Onboard WLAN

The notebook comes equiped with a ipw3945-based a/b/g WIFI card.

It is fully supported by the OpenSource ipw3945 driver (you'll have to install a binary-only firmware image tho) Installation requires a little bit manual work on a debian box:

• Download the binary firmware (aka "ucode") and copy it into /lib/firmware. The ucode ships with a very informative README in case something goes wrong on your end.
• Download and install the binary ipw deamon "ipw3945d" by copying the 32 or 64 bit version into /sbin
• Download, compile and install the latest ipw3945 driver.

In order to connect to any WAP with your WLAN card, the ipw3945d deamon must be running at all times. Manually launching the deamon after each reboot is far from perfect so we automate the process:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
	wireless-essid 00MY0ESS0ID
	wireless-key s:my-clever-plaintext-password
	wireless-mode managed
	pre-up (/sbin/ipw3945d --isrunning || /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet) \
	|| true ; sleep 2
	pre-down (/sbin/ipw3945d --isrunning && /sbin/ipw3945d --kill) \
	|| true	

Please note the pre-up and pre-down statements for eth1 (ipw3945 in my case).
They kill the deamon on ifdown, and launch it on ifup if it is not already running.

Update 20070505:

Added a short sleep (2 sec) after launching ipw3945d. Now the network comes up on a reboot w/o manual aid.

Update 20080101:

A corrupted nvram on my WLAN AP running dd-wrt caused all kinds of problems with the ipw3945 driver, including random firmware resets / lockups and degraded throughput requiring one to unload / load the driver to fix. After cleanung up the AP, I have also discovered that the following module options to ipw3945 greatly enhance stability and reduce firmware lockups:

modprobe ipw3945 led=1 channel=6