On 07/26/2009 04:23 PM, derek starr wrote:

To Brian Morrison and Steven F. LeBrun,

Steven F. LeBrun, I appreciate your suggestions. I hope what I tell Brian below, is in keeping with what you suggest. Your quote:
"There are 10 types of people in this world, those that understand binary and those who don't."
with it's quirky humor, is great! I have a mathematics degree from the University of California. I am familiar with binary,octal,decimal and hexadecimal number bases.

Brian, you are correct, I should have subscribed to the Fedora NetworkManager list, instead of the laptop list. My mistake! I will probably subscribe to that list tomorrow and document my wireless problem.

I went to 'System -> Administration -> Add/Remove Software' and hopefully downloaded
'Firmware for Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG'

I have never used the 'Add/Remove Software' administrative tool before, so I did not what to expect. I am not sure I downloaded the driver to my computer.

This was my last message on the '/var/log/messages' you told me to check.
'Jul 26 12:49:07 localhost yum: Installed: iwl3945-firmware-15.32.2.9-1.fc11.noarch'

Immediately after reading that message, I went to 'System -> Administration -> Network', but when under the 'Devices' tab, when I clicked on the 'wlan1' entry, the 'Activate' , on the menu bar above, was grayed out. I could find no way to activate 'wlan1', which had my Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG card.

Any further suggestions or comments? I definitely appreciate the help that both of you have given me so far.

Derek Starr
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Hi Derek,

If your network device is controlled by NetworkManager, you will no be able to activate or deactivate it using system-config-network (the command you reached through the System menu).

Run system-config-network, select your wireless card and then click on the edit icon. In the dialog page/General tab that appears, the first checkbox item is "Controlled by NetworkManager". If you deselect that checkbox, you can activate the wireless card back in the main system-config-network dialog (devices tab).

Also, did you reboot your laptop after installing iwl3945? I am not sure if it is necessary but I always do it after installing new drivers, especially if they do not work after install before a reboot.

Are you familiar with the /etc/sysconfig directory? There are two subdirectories, networking and network-scripts that are related to running networking. I do not advise editing any of these files directly unless you are sure of what you are doing. There are applets like system-config-network that will do the modifications safely and correctly since changing one parameter may require changes in multiple files and even the creation of new files.

You may want to look at the files there to see if the data looks correct. Your system should have a file ifcfg-wlan1 (in multiple places in /etc/systconfig/network-scripts and /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices). There should be an ifcfg-* file for each of your network devices. That fact that your wireless card is named wlan1 instead of wlan0 suggests to me that there is something different between our configurations. If you notice values in these files that does not look correct, find out how to change the values correctly (probably with system-config-network or a similar tool).

Do you know why your wireless adapter is wlan1 instead of wlan0? Was this an option you selected somewhere? Is there also a wlan0?

Your other source of information is your boot log and messages.log. During each rebooting of my laptop, my wlan0 fails to initializes and an error message is reported. If you post the section of you messages log file and boot.log (if your boot.log is not empty) relating to starting/activating your wlan1, it would help.

>From my boot.log:

Bringing up interface eth0:
Determining IP information for eth0... failed; no link present. Check cable?
[FAILED]
Bringing up interface wlan0: Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

Determining IP information for wlan0... failed.
[FAILED]

There is no cable connected to eth0 so its failure is expected. The "Set Mode" error for wlan0 is a problem with one of the statements in one of the ifup-XXX scripts and appears to be harmless in this case. When NetworkManager starts up, it successfully starts my wlan0 connection to my intranet, getting an IP address from my DHCP server. This all appears during a reboot.

Let me know if this helps or you still need or want more help. It is after midnight and I am not sure how coherent I am at the moment. :-)

BTW. I like the "10 types of people" quote; I first saw it on a t-shirt somewhere.

BTW2. When I run "lsmod | grep iwl", I get the following:

[root@tardis default]# lsmod | grep iwl
iwl3945               125016 0
mac80211           164720 1 iwl3945
lib80211                5064 1 iwl3945
cfg80211               30604 2 iwl3945,mac80211

The first column are modules that are loaded and the last column is the modules that use that module. Are all four of these modules loaded on your laptop?

Steven F. LeBrun

Quote: "The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed."
-- G.K. Chesterton