Upgrading from ipw3945 to iwl3945 Intel Driver
So I bought myself a beautiful new laptop for myself last week. It cost under €1000 and I saved about €600 by not ordering it through Dell and searching for a good bargain on Ebay instead.
So within the day I had a lovely install of Ubuntu Gutsy working perfectly on the machine. Everything was purring nicely apart from one niggling thing. Even though wifi was working 100% out of the box it was working well below the speeds I am accustomed to. With a maximum download speed of 20kpbs something had to be done. I determined that the root cause was the ipw3945 which is a restricted driver in gutsy. However, with Hardy Heron, released this month btw, the ipw module will be deprecated so I decided to look into the new alternative iwl3945. Details about the installation are now below. Enjoy.
Delete the following 2 lines from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules :
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:1b:77:19:62:9a", NAME="eth1"
Then add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist :
blacklist ipw3945
blacklist ieee80211
blacklist ieee80211_crypt
Add the following to /etc/modules :
iwlwifi_mac80211
iwl3945
After editing the above files, issue these commands at the command line :
sudo modprobe -r ieee80211
sudo modprobe -r ieee80211_crypt_tkip
sudo modprobe -r ieee80211_crypt_ccmp
sudo modprobe -r ieee80211_crypt_wep
sudo modprobe -r ieee80211_crypt
sudo modprobe -r mac80211
sudo modprobe iwlwifi_mac80211
sudo modprobe iwl3945
Your wireless interface should now appear as wlan0. Fast downloads are mine once more :D
In conclusion, the M1330 is a bitching machine. It is lightning fast with Linux and has all the creature comforts that I was expecting. Go get one now.
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One thing about the new driver, it does not support the scanning of networks just yet. I also fully upgraded to Hardy Heron last night and the bug is still there. Don't think that this will be a popular move, especially for laptop users. Time to find a fix...