Ipw3945

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Revision as of 05:00, 27 February 2008 by Jaskiern (Talk | contribs) (Removed references to machines this driver+card combination could be found in. It is duplicated by info in the article about the card.)
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The most recent revision of the Intel Centrino platform utilizes a new generation of wireless networking device connected to the system via PCI-E, and not PCI (like the ipw2200-line used to do). Therefore, a new driver must be used. A Sourceforge project supporting the new cards is available at http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/. As of February 26, 2008, the project's code (Stable Release 1.2.0) depends on a binary-only, proprietary user-space-daemon communicating with the driver via sysfs. It is not possible to operate this device with Free Software exclusively at the moment. The license-terms the daemon is released under prohibit reverse-engineering of the communication-protocol; this will hopefully not hold developers outside the US, where clauses like this one are not enforceable, from re-implementing a free variant of some sort.

External Discussion

This issue already sparked discussions on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

There is also a very revealing interview with the author of the OpenBSD driver for the 3945, in which it comes out that Intel has lied (at least by omission) about the purpose of the "regulatory daemon".

History

The ipw2200-drivers in kernel 2.6.15 (and possibly later) do not work with this adapter. There is the stable binary driver ipw3945 that attracted its fair share of critics from the open source community. Now however there is a "development" version of iwlwifi. As of 2.6.23, this is natively supported in the kernel. Make sure that MAC80211 and IWL3945 kernel config options are either compiled as modules or built into the kernel.

Comments

ipw3945 works with http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ drivers. A Spanish summary, but easy to understand about how to install: esDebian Forum, maxim_o message (longer)

Thinkpad topic: on ThinkPads like the Z60 that have one. remember to put the wireless switch in the on state! But you will not be able to enable the Wireless LED with Fn+F5, it is not a problem.

One more comment: if you want monitor mode (e.g for use with Kismet or other network sniffers), you need to uncomment CONFIG_IPW3945_MONITOR=y line from ipw3945-1.1.0 Makefile.

Packages

See also

  • Iwlwifi provides a newer, Open driver