[lug] Intel 3945 wireless on Fedora Core 5

[D. Stimits]

...

>If you have the kernel source tree for your distro installed, you should be
>able to untar the driver in whatever directory, cd into it, and type
>'make'.  No mucking about with the kernel source by hand is required. 
>
>  
>
I have the 2.6.16 kernel source from kernel.org...I tend to cut out 
unneeded stuff and do a custom compile almost immediately after doing a 
new install. So far I've been unable to succeed using the 2.6.16 source 
(and it was configured exactly to match the running kernel)...probably 
related to the hotplug stuff stated below.

>See here: http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/INSTALL
>
>It tells you exactly what to run and why.  
>
>  
>
The part where it starts diverging for me:

DIR=$(sed -ne "s:^FIRMWARE_DIR=\([^, ]*\).*:\1:p" \
		/etc/hotplug/firmware.agent)

There is no /etc/hotplug/ on FC5, although there is on FC4. There is no 
"firmware.agent" anywhere on FC5 at all...the closest I can come to this 
is the "/etc/udev/rules.d/51-hotplug.rules". There seems to be a new way 
of working with hotplug in FC5 (and I do have hotplug installed and 
working...at least with USB it seems to work).

It was mentioned that the ieee80211 stack that is used by this driver 
probably is not compatible between the kernel-supplied version and the 
one for this item. This might be part of the problem, since I had 
originally added this as a non-module permanent part of my kernel 
config. I'm going to try rebuilding my kernel with this as a module, and 
then switching over to their 80211 stack (which makes me a bit worried, 
I'm wondering what other things this particular implementation is not 
compatible with).

I might buy a separate wireless card and forego the Intel one if I get 
too desperate...since I won't be using a Fedora-supplied 
kernel/configuration.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net

PS: For those interested, I did discover there is a wireless access 
point available with its own radius server built in, the netgear 
WAP302.  It seems to support hardware accel SHA256, and probably runs 
linux under the hood (it even has ssh access).