I'm running Fedora Core 6 on a Dell Latitude D820 with on-board wireless: Intel(r) 3945 802.11a/g Dual-Band Mini Card. I've installed wireless cards on Linux laptops before. It sure has gotten a lot easier than the days of RedHat 7.*. This worked for me, but I don't claim that it will work for you.
The following does 3 things:
1) Installs the ipw3945 driver needed for this card
2) Installs the extras (I don't have the name right now), i.e. ieee80211, etc.
3) Makes them easily manageable with the Network Manager, a nice feature that popped up somewhere between FC2 and FC6.
I found a nice little page to help me with this, and I added some other things from other places in. I'm copying them almost verbatim here, just for my own use, and I doubt they are all necessary, but it's what worked. Here were the basic steps I took:
#########################
#Install Firmware
yum install ipw2200-firmware
#Install Freshrpms
rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/5/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
#Get wireless drivers. I don't know if this requires prior dkms installation or not...
yum install ipw3945d ipw3945-firmware dkms-ipw3945
#Get the usual wireless packages (I've added these lines from this page.)
The binary microcode image, available here.
The binary user space regulatory daemon, available here too.
The ieee80211 subsystem version 1.1.11 or newer.
Linux kernel 2.6.13 or newer. See README.ipw3945 for information on specific options required to be enabled in the kernel.
Wireless Extensions (v17) and Tools (v28)
# Start the DBUS message system:
service dhcdbd start
# Start the NetworkManager system (awesome!):
service NetworkManager start
# Set both of these to start up automatically:
chkconfig --level 345 dhcdbd on
chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManager on
#############################
This page is the main sourceforge project page for the driver, and includes the 802.XX IEEE standard stuff, and a few other things. I'm not sure you need all of these extras, but it's likely you do need them according to the project folks.
One useful thing in this process was "modprobe ipw3945". You'might find that when you go through all the above steps, the driver isn't loaded for your card. It turned out for me that I probably didn't properly define some installation paths for the ieee packages, so that when the module was loaded, it went to look for those things and didn't find them. Running modprobe spat out some errors that diagnosed this, and all I had to do was make copies of said files in the places where they were expected. Sorry I didn't save the exact output to post here.
1 comment:
The steps I listed essentially worked to get the wireless driver going, but the NetworkManager doesn't quite work yet, so to start the wireless, I use the old ifcfg-eth1, edited to match the ESSID and key of the network I want to connect to. The 'iwconfig' command still works pretty well for detecting networks.
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