ipw3945 wireless on duo-core. Lights are on... nobody home.

[yinrunning]

So I've been doing some pretty intensive reading and experimenting for the past two weeks trying to get the intel ipw3945 wireless working on my dell inspirion 9400. No luck.

I've followed the guides and read the howto's. I've installed everything listed with no errors. The card works just fine in the dual-booted windows xp install. In gentoo, all I get is:

[Kate Monster]

Hello,

I do not know anything about that specific wifi card, but can you get it to work with ndiswrapper?

[no_hope]

you shouldn't need ndiswrapper to get this card to work.

If you emerge ipw3945, you shouldn't have to run ipw3945d. I believe when you do modprobe ipw3945, ipw3945d will be started automatically.

What does your dmesg look like when you do the modprobe?

[no_hope]

oops

[yinrunning]

I'll post the actual when I get back into a wired connection. ( in windoze on wireless right now ).

But basically, it tries to load the module and the 802 stack and then just.. craps out. the 802 seems to load from what I can see. But every time it gets to the ipw module... bang. error.

I've even gotten it to try to load at boot... no dice.

I almost suspect it's a hotplug issue, but I've tried several of the hotplug fixes I've seen regarding this and nothing produces any results (or difference whatsoever).

[no_hope]

[yinrunning]

hmm... Is there anything specific I need for pci-e?

dmesg:

[no_hope]

Hm. You are running a pretty old version of the driver. Try to update? What kernel version are you running? Did you emerge ipw3945 and ipw3945d? You mentioned that you followed guides to install drivers. All you should need to do is run emerge ipw3945

[yinrunning]

hmm... did. just yesterday actually. I'll try an emerge --sync and try again.

[yinrunning]

well...

I seem to be getting less errors. bumped to module 1.1.0-r1 and daemon 1.7.22-r3.

now.... umm..... not sure what to do.

did ln -s net.lo net.eth1

now..... how do I get net.eth1 to be the wireless card?

I do
- modprobe ipw3945
- /etc/init.d/net.eth1 up

right? am I missing something? Here's my /etc/conf.d/net:

[no_hope]

to get a file corresponding to eth1 just make a copy of net.eth0 and call it in net.eth1 (in /etc/inid.d/)

You are supposed to use two files for wireless configuration (I think). one is /etc/conf.d/net another /etc/conf.d/wireless. I am not sure what goes into which file, but you might want to look at /etc/conf.d/wireless.example

To debug the problem do the following:

[yinrunning]

Well, I know most of that, but how do you get net.eth1 to correspond to the wireless card specifically? Every instruction I've seen assumes that it "just will". Nothing seems to deal with the possibility that it won't. And apparently in my case, it won't.

[no_hope]

net.eth1 will correspond to whatever interface is called eth1. The script will infer which interface it should control from its own name (roughly speaking). For example, Atheros-based wireless cards are called ath0, ath1, etc. When I used those, I would make a copy of net.eth0 to net.ath0 and everything would work.

If your wireless card really is called eth1 (as Intel wireless cards usually are), script net.eth1 will attempt to configure it. If that doesn't work (but the command from my previous post works), the problem is with the configuration files, /etc/conf.d/net and /etc/conf.d/wireless, not the net.eth1 script.

This is what failed last time:

[yinrunning]

Yes, I see what you're saying. I did alot more reading last night and even more re-reading.

And the problem is definitely before I try iwconfig, because that only sees lo and eth0.

So, my problem is still back with the driver and the physical card talking to each other. I've tried up-/down-grading udev, emerging a world update, upping the card driver version... hmm.... gotta be something else I can try. Not sure what.

At least I'm learning some stuff, right?

[no_hope]