Hacks for Intel 3945ABG Wireless Card
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.