help with transition ipw3945 --> iwl3945

[Paul Johnson]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 12:21 PM, John W. Linville <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 08:03:19PM +0000, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
>  > On 09/03/2008, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > >  It appears to me the reasonable thing is to fall back on the ipw3945
>  > >  driver again, but I can't get ti to compile with 2.6.24.  So maybe I
>  > >  should revert to the older kernel, but it is pretty depressing to
>  > >  wrestle with this.  Hell, the Intel ipw3945 device must be used fairly
>  > >  widely, and there are about a million Dell users floating about with
>  > >  them.
>
>  Intel doesn't support the ipw3945 driver anymore, and Intel provides
>  no documentation on their hardware outside of Intel.  If iwl3945
>  isn't working up to snuff then Intel must bear the brunt of the
>  responsibility.
>
>
>  > >  Is there nobody who works on the kernel in Fedora stuck with ipw3945?
>  > >  I can't understand how they keep trotting out iwl3945 and acting as
>  > >  though it will work.
>  > >
>  >
>  > Well, Linville has one, but he's having a hard time to reproduce the
>  > issues. If you want to read the gory details :
>  >
>  > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=397921
>
>  In fact, I currently have custody of a 2nd ipw3945-equipped laptop.
>  Both of mine work fine in every environment easily available to me.
>  This includes open, WEP, and WPA-PSK security.  I cannot account for
>  why some people seem to have zero success while I have few problems,
>  almost none of which are unique to the Intel drivers.
>
>  I suspect that that something (either the Intel drivers or mac80211
>  itself) is sensitive to certain AP configurations, and in some cases
>  tiny bits of old/bad configuration settings may be hanging around
>  confusing things.
>

Yes, that is what I suspect as well.  I started this thread trying to
ask  the question "what old crap do I need to get rid of"? to go from
ipw3945 and iwl3945.

Aside from completely erasing the root partition, what can I do to be
sure I have nuked every bit of ipw3945?  I killed the firmware, killed
ipw3945d, removed all of the configured files from
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts.

Where does NetworkManager keep its information on networks. I'd like
to kill all of that completely.

Do you have any luck running the compat-wireless packages?  I mean this thing:

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

The apparently update this everyday, even though the file name never changes;

http://linuxwireless.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2

It is no wonder that we are having inexplicable problems with
wireless. If the Fedora kernel folks are grabbing this
soup-of-the-day, then a lot of the trouble may start to make sense.

Look what I see today with that compat-wireless version of iwl3945.
Scanning fails entirely.  This happens before or after I'm associated
to a wireless network.

$ /sbin/iwlist scan
lo        Interface doesn't support scanning.

wmaster0  Interface doesn't support scanning.

wlan0     No scan results

eth0      Interface doesn't support scanning.


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas