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My laptop has an Intel 3945ABG mini-pci wireless card. Overall it seems to be a pretty good card, but there are some driver issues on Linux (as of 2.6.24). First wpa_supplicant has an annoying habbit of spewing out an error message (ioctl[SIOCSIWAUTH]: Operation not supported) whenever I start up the network interface. It seems to work fine regardless, but the message annoys me. I silenced it by adding the following line to my /etc/conf.d/net:

wpa_supplicant_wlan0="-Dwext 2> /dev/null"

Another problem I had was that the card wasn’t properly powering itself up and down when I restarted the network interface. I took care of that with this little preup script which I also added to /etc/conf.d/net:

preup() {
  if [ ${IFACE} = "wlan0" ]; then
    echo 0 > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl3945/*/rf_kill
    iwconfig wlan0 txpower on
  fi
}

Update: As of 2.6.25 the powerup issue seems to be resolved, but I still see the error message from wpa_supplicant.

If you want pontification on distraction go here. If you want a solution go here.