Installing iwlwifi with a debian kernel

From Foomagic

Mac80211 has been in the mainline kernel since 2.6.22. If you wish to use the iwlwifi driver without patching or compiling your own kernel, you can do it fairly easily with the debian 2.6.22 kernel. (this has been in sid for a while now and has also made it to lenny.) I have tested this with the 2.6.22-2-686/amd64 kernel and iwlwifi-1.0.0-1/1.1.20. Unfortunately, at this stage iwlwifi needs the entire kernel source to build, so its not just a case of installing headers.

# aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r` linux-source-2.6.22

* unpack the source so cd to /usr/src

# cd /usr/src
# tar jxf linux-source-2.6.22.tar.bz2

* link our modules directory to the source

# ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.22 /lib/modules/`uname -r`/source 

$ wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-1.0.0.tgz

# tar jxf iwlwifi-1.0.0.tgz
# cd iwlwifi-1.0.0
# make
# make install

$ wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-3945-ucode-2.14.4.tgz

# tar jxf iwlwifi-3945-ucode-2.14.4.tgz
# cp iwlwifi-3945-ucode-2.14.4/iwlwifi-3945.ucode /lib/firmware/

edit: the newer code needs the ucode to be numbered, its actually the same ucode, but just with a different file name, so if you get this error

iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode firmware file req failed: Reason -2

then just run the following command.

# cp /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3945.ucode /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode

Thats it. modprobe iwl3945 or iwl4965 depending on your card and check dmesg for errors. If it all looks good, enjoy.

note: your interface should now be called 'wlan0' rather than eth{0,1} when you try and configure it.

If you get a -2 firmware error, check /lib/firmware to make sure the ucode is in there. (make sure its just the firmware, not a directory inside /lib/firmware, also see the edit above)

If you install a new kernel image, you will need to remake the link to /lib/modules and build the driver again.

ln -s /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.22 /lib/modules/`uname -r`/source