[ltp] Re: My Wireless Experiences with a T41

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Dirk Husemann wrote:

> I'm running Fedora Core 1 with a 2.4.22 kernel (not the fedora kernel) 
> on an R40 and with Fabrice's driver the Ad-Hoc mode *doesn't* work: for 
> one, it won't accept an ESSID (iwconfig eth1 essid xxxxx seems to be a NOP).

Yep, my findings too.

> the cisco driver works with a plain vanilla 2.4.22 kernel.

You mean vanilla as in kernel.org?  I just can't get it to work with
the Fedora kernel.  Did you find this too, but swapping to kernel.org
made it work?

I guess if you can confirm this I could give it a go.  Such a pity to
desert the Fedora kernel though, for maintenance and because I hear
they added lots of 2.6 improvements into it.  It would be nice to
track this down and feed it back into Fedora's bugzilla database, if
you can confirm and let me know if you have any idea where the
problem is in the Fedora kernel?

There *is* a bugzilla entry against Fedora for the Aironet 350, but
reading it I'm assuming it's maybe the PCMCIA version:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=109394

But clearly this could be related.  There's a report that downgrading
the firmware to 4.25.30 might work (although the reporter says no),
and I can't find any firmware this low for the miniPCI card.

If you can confirm you *did* get it working with a kernel.org kernel
while it *didn't* work for you either in the Fedora kernel, it would
be useful to add this to the bugzilla entry above: they may fix it.

> that seems to depend on the wireless card: in my case it's not possible, 
> since my linux firewall/router is the R40 with the cisco mpi in it...if 
> that were a Prism based WLAN card instead, it seems that than you could 
> switch that to AP mode....

Thanks, yes, I looked into this after your comment.  My router has a
Lucent/orinoco which I'm told is hackable to act as Managed: but it
requires devfs, which Red Hat swear is bad and doesn't work in their
kernel even if you try to compile it in...