Activating wireless channels 12 and 13

Marko Vojinovic vvmarko at gmail.com
Wed Nov 25 20:03:37 UTC 2009


This is what I found as generic instructions for the iwl3945 driver:

<quote>
If you are not in the US, more Wifi channels are available (EU: 13 instead of 
11). If you cannot see your Wifi, but you know it is there, check if it is on 
Channel 12 or 13.

To fix, create /etc/modprobe.d/iwl3945-fix and add the following line: "options 
cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU". Reload to the driver for the change to become 
active: "modprobe -r iwl3945", then "modprobe iwl3945". 
</quote>

However, these instructions are not Fedora-specific and I am not sure how old. 
So is this the *proper* way to configure this thing in Fedora 12?

And btw, IIRC during the installation, anaconda asks me for geographical 
location (to setup local time or whatever...). If I am somewhere outside US, 
could this thing be configured automatically?

I understand that this is not allowed in US, but is the situation as hopeless 
as the software patents problem, or can something be done about it?

Finally, I am curious --- if I live in Europe, have wireless channels 12 and 
13 active by default on my laptop, and then decide to travel to USA for a 
week, am I breaking some law? I mean *unintentionally*, since I might not be 
aware of the details of my computer setup? I guess one could ask similar 
question wrt strong encryption algorithms and other stuff illegal in US-only...

So what is the story here? :-)

Best, :-)
Marko




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