[lug] Intel 3945 wireless on Fedora Core 5

[Ken MacFerrin]

D. Stimits wrote:
> ...
> 
>> 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).
> 

And on a side note, this would be a good reason why I use Gentoo.  One
"emerge ipw3945" and you're done.

I got tired of dealing with all the hacks for everything that the
RH/Fedora team didn't think should be included in the core distro back
around RH8.  Every time I've ever finished installing all the extra
packages from various repositories and workarounds to make an FC box
really usable as a desktop it feels like the thing is held together with
duck tape and bailing wire..
-Ken