If there is one thing you learn from life, is that nothing is ever straightforward. That was the case when I lent out a hand over the Ubuntu/OSX dual boot, that certainly is the case now. As fairly evident with the previous entries, Ubuntu 7.10 support for the Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN has been nothing short of pitiful. This is a problem because of three main aspects.
The first is that Ubuntu opted to use the obsolete ipw3945 driver. This driver yielded very uneven results from what I gather online. My experience with this driver has been rather awful. The second is that the bundled official iwl4965
(and iwl3945) drivers are out of date. I have gotten far better results with these drivers than the obsolete ones, but the driver sputters out after a few days of operation. The third main factor is that Ubuntu
chose not to fix it and instead peddle their fixes on the next release. This is not an issue of 7.10 falling out of support. This is an old issue in the Ubuntu bug tracker and one of which they were nice enough to mark as "Won't Fix".
Firstly, if the OS has old drivers, that is forgiveable if there is a fix coming, ideally providing a release with the same kernel. Second, if the folks opt not to fix this, the least they could do is provide an official workaround for poor old folks like me. If there is no official support, then that just makes the Ubuntu life that much harder to live with.
That being said, Ubuntu is still a fine distribution and one I intend to keep using. Maybe I was unfortunate to have picked hardware where Linux support is not what it is cut out to be.
Now, to push this particular problem forward, I found this
comment on the Ubuntu bug tracker, one that I hope finally erases this bug forever.
Of course, when I followed his instructions to the letter, I broke my wireless support. This is the warm and glowing message dmesg greeted me with.
[432944.556000] iwl4965: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN driver for Linux, 1.1.0[432944.556000] iwl4965: Copyright(c) 2003-2007 Intel Corporation[432944.556000] iwl4965: Detected Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN[432944.816000] iwl4965: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 19 802.11a channels[432944.816000] wmaster0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-4965-rs'[432945.396000] iwl4965: Error sending REPLY_SCAN_CMD: time out after 500ms.[432945.396000] iwl4965: TX Power requested while scanning!You vermin! I am utterly irrate by the constant headaches this driver problem has given me. All is not lost however. It is a good thing I normally keep a backup of all things before fiddling them. So by checking the dates, and making sure to use the iwl4965 firmware in the context of the comment, I gave the
iwlwifi-4965-ucode-4.44.1.20.tgz (posted November 27, 2009) firmware a try. We will see how this one goes. So far it looks like the driver is working after the good old
modprobe -r/modprobe reloading trick. We will see how this one fairs.
Anton Khokhlov wrote on 2007-12-20
Yesterday I had found the solution. Ubuntu seems to use old Intel firmware and the issue will be resolved if you perform the following steps:www.intellinuxwireless.org/?p=iwlwifi&n=Downloads . The file's name is iwlwifi-4965-ucode-version number.tgz4965-ucode-what version you got.tgziwlwifi-4965.ucode and /lib/firmware/your kernel version/iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode (you should overwrite two files with the same data)
- Download the last firmware archive from http://
- Unpack the archive tar xvf iwlwifi-
- Copy iwlwifi-4965.ucode from the unpacked folder into /lib/firmware/your kernel version/
After that you need to reboot or just to say
rmmod iwl4965
modprobe iwl4965
Now on my computer it have been working for the 24 hours continuously without any disconnect. But I can not guarantee it works everywhere.