Installing the Intel ipw3945 driver

To get the Intel/PRO Wireless driver to work, follow the following steps:

• In gentoo, just emerge ipw3945.
• In openSuSE with the default openSuSE kernel, this driver is already included, so you need to do nothing. It works out of the box. With another non-suse kernel, you will may have to compile the module seperately as I describe below.
• In debian, follow the instructions below:

Installing ipw3945 on debian

$ su
# apt-get install ipw3945d firmware-ipw3945 wireless-tools

Note that both ipw3945d and firmware-ipw3945 packages are in the non-free section of debian repositories, so if you haven't set up apt to use non-free packages, this command will fail. To get non-free packages, modify your /etc/apt/sources.list to have a line that looks like this:

deb <server_url> etch main contrib non-free

If you are using the kernel packages that I provide here or you are building linux-2.6.19-beyond4 from sources with the ipw3945-1.2.0.patch, then you don't need to do anything else. As soon as you install the packages above, you will be able to use wireless.

Now, if you have an official debian linux kernel, then you can install the ipw3945 package which includes the needed kernel module. If you are using another custom kernel, you have to compile the module as I describe below.

Compiling the ipw3945 module

Ok, now that you have the basics, download the ieee802.11 network stack sources and the ipw3945 sources. Here are their sites: http://ieee80211.sourceforge.net/ and http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/. Just get the latest versions from there. I am currently using ieee80211-1.2.15 and ipw3945-1.1.3.

Extract them somewhere and then enter the directory with the ieee802.11 sources. Issue the following commands:

$ su
# make
# make install

If it asks you any questions, just press enter. In addition, if you see lots of warnings, just ignore them. Note that these commands must be issued while you are running the kernel that you want to compile the modules for.

UPDATE: Since linux-2.6.19.2, ieee80211-1.2.16 is included in the kernel so you just have to enable it in the kernel. Building it separately is not needed (but you can do it anyway).

After that, enter the directory with the ipw3945 sources and issue the commands:

$ su
# make
# cp ipw3945.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/
# depmod -a

Now reboot to verify that everything works as expected. The Wireless interface is normally shown as eth2. eth0 is the ethernet interface and eth1 is the firewire network interface. If you haven't configured the firewire interface, it may show up as eth1.

Also note that in order for the wireless interface to work, the ipw3945d regulatory daemon must be loaded after the module is loaded. In debian, everything is set up automatically and after running depmod, you don't need to configure anything else. In other distributions, if it doesn't work, read the INSTALL file in the ipw3945 source code directory.

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