Re: [gentoo-user] Wireless Issue

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Am Donnerstag, 25. März 2010 schrieb CJoeB:
> Hi,
>
> I have an Intel 3945 wireless adaptor in my laptop.  I have always used
> the ipw3945 driver in gentoo because I have never had any luck with the
> iwl3945 driver.
> [...]
> Tonight I, again, following the wiki, tried building the iwl3945 driver
> into the kernel, but had no success.  I need to get wireless working
> because I am changing isp's and will not longer be using an ethernet
> connection, but a dsl one.

Have you found out yet what really isn’t working? It could be a number of 
things, but when dealing with kernel drivers “it doesn’t work“ is not enough. 
;-)

> I don't know if it matters, but I am using wireless-extensions as
> opposed to wpa-supplicant because it doesn't seem that wpa-supplicant
> supports the Intel 3945 wireless adaptor.

IWL3945 and wpa_supplicant are working just fine over here. My only difference 
is that I’ve built it as a module. Here’s what I set in the kernel config.

Networking
  [*] Wireless
    -*- Wireless extensions
    {M} Common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers
    <M> Generic IEEE 802.11 Networking Stack (mac80211)
Device drivers
  [*] Network device support
    Wireless LAN
      [*] Wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11)
        <M> Intel Wireless WiFi
          <M> Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection (iwl3945)

# lsmod | grep iwl3945:
iwl3945                80412  0 
iwlcore                98076  1 iwl3945
mac80211              142636  2 iwl3945,iwlcore
cfg80211               82108  3 iwl3945,iwlcore,mac80211

IIRC, there’s nothing more to it, really.
I also added suppor for tun/tap and devices and some ppp options because I use 
vpn on my Uni’s network, but I don’t reckon they’re a requisite for wireless. 

Then I grabbed iwl3945-ucode from portage, and that was it, IIRC. Just last 
weekend I rebuilt my system from scratch and it worked right away after I 
installed the ucode, dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant. Then I created the symlink 
net.wlan0 -> net.lo in /etc/init.d and added it to the default runleven via 
rc-update. Oh yeah, I had to add the driver module iwl3945 to 
modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6, because it didn’t get loaded (by udev?) at 
boot. Not sure if that is still necessary, but it was at some point in the 
past, obviosly.

Lastly, you need of course a correct wpa config, which is no rocket science 
either. Here’s mine for our WPA2 home network:

network={
	ssid="our ssid"
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
#	group=TKIP
	psk="our secret keyphrase"
}

To connect, I did:

# wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -Dwext -iwlan0 &
# dhcpcd wlan0 &

and I was ready to go (That is from my memory, it may contain typos or similar 
errors).
-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
UNIX is not user-unfriendly.
It just expects the user to be a little more computer-friendly.