[lug] Intel 3945 wireless on Fedora Core 5

[Matthew Snelham]

On 24 Jun 2006 02:16 PM or thereabouts, D. Stimits wrote:
> I've been trying to install some wireless drivers for some integrated 
> wireless hardware which I know is supported, but which seems to not be 
> directly available in the kernel (I'm guessing because of licensing or 
> political issues). 

Both licensing and political.

Personally, though I don't work for or with the driver development teams, I
think [that the certian large semiconductor company I work for] has missed
the boat on the 3945 driver implementation. 

Rather than taking care of regulatory compliance in the firmware (a la the
ipw2x00 drivers, which are now excellent, BTW), they have a firmware
segment AND a "Userspace regulatory compliance daemon", or ipw3945d.  The
Linux driver for the 3945 is NOT a real driver, it's a passthrough between
the (binary blob) firmware and the (binary blob) userspace daemon.  It's
essentially a binary only driver... it just happens to be well supported by
the manufacturer.  

(Actually, using the 3945 in rtap/parasite mode with ethereal is possibly
the best wireless network monitoring solution availible on Linux at the
moment.)

See:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/12/1837238&threshold=5

AND

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6650

> Has anyone here ever installed the 3945 drivers? If so, did you use the 
> source by copying it into a kernel source tree? Is it simply a matter of 
> a recursive copy to the drivers/ subdirectory? Or to the drivers/net/ 
> subdirectory? Or did you stick with a stock kernel?

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. 

See here: http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/INSTALL

It tells you exactly what to run and why.  

--Matthew
infinite at sigalrm.com

--
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