Iwlwifi

From ThinkWiki
Revision as of 20:01, 18 August 2008 by Yogism (Talk | contribs) (Notes)
Jump to: navigation, search

Intel Wireless WiFi Link drivers for Linux, or iwlwifi, which provides official, Open support for wireless Intel adapters. Initially, it only supported Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Mini-PCI Express Adapter and Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN Mini-PCI Express Adapter. More wireless projects are planned to move to this project in the future.

The driver works out of the box with a hardware firmware replacement. Full documentation and source is available on this newer driver.


Notes

The previous Intel Wifi driver was named "ipw". Even though the ipw driver is considered deprecated, it is quite stable. If iwlwifi is causing problems (e.g. kernel oops on unloading iwl3945 module, frequent wireless disconnections), the ipw drivers provide a viable alternative. With a patch, the ipw driver works with the newer 2.6.25 kernels as well.

Availability

The iwl3945 driver was integrated into Linux-2.6.24. It needs a binary firmware image that can be obtained from the project homepage or from distribution repositories.

Packages

  • Debian
    • Debian Unstable (Sid) ships the firmware in the package "firmware-iwlwifi" (version 0.12) in non-free branch.
    • Debian Testing (Lenny) ships the firmware in the package "firmware-iwlwifi" (version 0.12) in non-free branch.

External links