Re: Switching from ipw3945 to iwl3945 driver]
On 03 Feb 2008, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 09:03:03 +0000, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > On 02 Feb 2008, Jurij Smakov wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > The 2.6.24 kernel has recently hit unstable, and it contains a new
> > > shiny iwl3945 driver which should replace the old ipw3945 one. The
> > > good news is that you will no longer need to run the ipw3945d binary
> > > daemon, the bad news is that binary firmware is still required (but it
> > > is available as a package). The plan is to remove ipw3945-modules-*
> > > and ipw3945d packages from the archive as soon as 2.6.24 kernel hits
> > > testing. Because of that, everyone running unstable and using ipw3945
> > > is encouraged to switch to using 2.6.24 and iwl3945 driver as soon as
> > > possible. The switching instructions are available at
> > >
> > > http://wiki.debian.org/iwlwifi
>
> [...]
>
> > I really wish this "improvement" would not be forced on anyone who wants
> > to use the 2.6.24 kernel. In spite of numerous attempts over the last
> > few months I've never managed to get the new system to work. For 2.6.23
> > I managed to compile my own ipw3945-modules but I can't do that for
> > 2.6.24. So I'm stuck with the older kernels for the foreseeable future.
> > Why can't we have the option to use the older system if we want to?
>
> The ipw3945 driver requires closed-source components and has been
> deprecated by Intel, the only party that has access to the full source
> code and hardware specifications. The kernel developers, on the other
> hand, generally don't care very much about breaking proprietary drivers
> with newer versions of the kernel, especially if there is an alternative
> available in the normal kernel tree.
>
> --
Unfortunately there does not seem to be an alternative for me. I had
another go at it last night. I set up things according to the advice on
the above site. Everything looked correct according to "ip a" and
"/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules", but nothing happened: the
indicator light never flickered to show the netwerk card was trying to
connect. This is what has always happened previously when I've tried to
use iwl3945. And I get this message:
wlan0: unknown hardware address type 801.
I googled for this and found some people on Ubuntu getting the same
thing but no obvious clue to what is wrong.
Anthony
--
Anthony Campbell - ac@acampbell.org.uk
Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
on-line books and sceptical articles)
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