wireless puzzle, Lenovo T60, 2.6.24
I hope that this is a reasonable place to ask this question. I have a
Lenovo T60 running Debian. I recently upgraded to Lenny and because
that upgrade killed direct rendering under Xorg (I'm using the ATI
drivers as packaged for Debian), I also upgraded to kernel 2.6.24
(using the Debian package linux-image-2.6.24-1-686).
That fixed the X problem, but my wireless setup ceased to work. The
T60 has the Intel 3945 wireless card:
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1010
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 66
Memory at edf00000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [d0] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Capabilities: [e0] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 32-3f-c5-ff-ff-d2-19-00
which in 2.6.24 is supported by the in-kernel iwl3945 driver from the
iwlwifi project.
The card is correctly detected by the kernel at boot:
iwl3945: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG/BG Network Connection driver for Linux, 1.1.17ks
iwl3945: Copyright(c) 2003-2007 Intel Corporation
iwl3945: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
iwl3945: Tunable channels: 11 802.11bg, 13 802.11a channels
phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-3945-rs'
I have a udev rewriting rule that renames the device associated with
this card to wlan. And in dmesg I see:
udev: renamed network interface wmaster0 to wlan
confirming that the renaming has succeeded. So I was able just to do
`ifup wlan' and `ifdown wlan' as needed. This worked very well.
But not under the new kernel. I get a `no such device' message using
either `ifup wlan' or `ifconfig wlan up'. If I do `iwconfig' I get
this report, though:
wlan no wireless extensions
wlan0_rename IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Channel:0 Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
And armed with this information I can:
ifconfig wlan0_rename up
iwconfig wlan0_rename essid WHATEVER
dhclient wlan0_rename
and connect.
So this is more a puzzle than a severe problem, but does anyone know
why the udev renaming rule doesn't play well with the new driver (or
at least I assume that this is an issue with the new driver)? Or why
the device can be addressed by way of the strange `wlan0_rename'? Or
how I might get back to my nice old functionality?
Thanks very much for any pointers or advice,
Jim
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