Thinkpads Forum

Hello all. I installed SLED 10 this weekend on a brand new Thinkpad T60 (with IntelPro Wireless 3945), but I cannot get the wireless to work....to save my life...

Plainly stated the main symptom is that I can't connect to anything EVEN THOUGH everything seems installed correctly and loaded right from install. Things I've noticed however:

0. install **seems** to have detected everything ok
1. ipw3945 module is loaded as reported by 'lsmod'
2. ipw3945 firmware module is ALSO loaded
3. ieee80211 module is ALSO loaded
4. ipw3945 daemon is running as reported by 'ps'

here is the kicker....

5. there is NO 'eth1' interface from ifconfig (eth0 is of course the wired interface).

6. I do see both the wired and the wireless device in YAST...but if do 'ifconfig'...I can ONLY see the wired line (and the loopback)

So it **appears** things are loaded and running...but somehow there is no interface for the wireless.

Have any of you had similar issues with your Thinkpads?


Any ideas?


TIA,
/mario


PS: couple of last points...the wireless works well in Windows...also the wireless switch on the T60 is in the ON position...so I know its not that.

coredumper wrote: 5. there is NO 'eth1' interface from ifconfig (eth0 is of course the wired interface).

One thing to take note of is that the command ifconfig itself only shows devices that have been brought up. To see an individual devcie you will need to either specify the device itself or use the -a flag.

Can you see the device if you use the iwconfig command?

coredumper wrote: Have any of you had similar issues with your Thinkpads?

I haven't had any issues getting wireless working in Ubuntu at all. In fact, the wireless works better under Ubuntu than it does in XP.

Hope this helps.

I have no experience, what so ever with SLED, but I'll throw in some advice anyway.

Have you tried doing an 'ifconfig eth1 up' and see if eth1 comes up with appropriate details after that?

Also, if you've compiled the driver from scratch, you may need to change away from the stock 802111 stack. At least that's what the Gentoo howto claims.

thanks, i was about to do just that since I saw on another forum some people tried that to get it to work.

instead, I gave it one last try following the EXACT directions here: http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/54/


and it FINALLY worked. the first 2 times I tried i did things a little different...but I really dont know what the differnce is...maybe some odd imature script that does things differently based on the order you configure things (or the obvious...I am just a complete dolt)

anyway, seems alive and kicking for now.

I got the same problem running ubuntu 6.10 on a T60 here. dmesg states that the wireless device (intel) is being detected on startup, and the modules are loaded, but theres no eth1 interface anywhere. I also don't see the wireless status led flickering up.
A page on the web suggested to remove everything but the loopback device from etc/network/interfaces, but it didn't work.

jedacite, could you be so kind and put the output of lsmod and the contents of your etc/network/interfaces ? Thanks..

Update: I'm typing this on wireless

I just installed the restricted kernel modules and it now works as it should.

For some reason, when I first installed the ipw3945 module on Debian unstable I had to unload/reload the module and restart the daemon before the interface showed up. There was a complaint in dmesg about the hardware not being present. After that, everything worked fine. I'm thinking the install process may have started the daemon before loading the module.

[quote="coredumper"]thanks, i was about to do just that since I saw on another forum some people tried that to get it to work.

instead, I gave it one last try following the EXACT directions here: http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/54/


and it FINALLY worked. the first 2 times I tried i did things a little different...but I really dont know what the differnce is...maybe some odd imature script that does things differently based on the order you configure things (or the obvious...I am just a complete dolt)

anyway, seems alive and kicking for now.[/quote]

Coredumper, does that mean that you un-installed, then installed SLED or did you just modify the re-install? I too have made some mistakes while installing the SLED10 on my XP T60P.. Would sure appreciate knowing how to proceed. My wireless card sometimes comes on and sometimes does not and I cant seem to figure out why or why not!
Any help/pointers would be much appreciated.

Jay