More Ubuntu 7.10 notes for Dell D630

So the wifi seemed to work pretty well out of the box but I noticed after prolonged use it would just suddenly freeze and the only way to make it come back was to reboot. (You couldn’t even reload the module or restart networking stack).

You can tell if this will be a problem for you by running iwconfig: if you have lots of Invalid misc errors and the signal and noise levels are fixed at -60dBm then you will want to switch from the ipw3945 module to the iwl3945.

To try it out: sudo modprobe -r ipw3945 sudo modprobe -r ieee80211 sudo modprobe -r ieee80211_crypt sudo modprobe -r mac80211 sudo modprobe iwlwifi_mac80211 sudo modprobe iwl3945

Now if you run iwconfig you should see wlan0 (plus wmaster0 which we’ll just ignore). If it’s called wlan0_rename then you run sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules Comment out the line reserving eth1 for ipw3945 module.

To make this all permanent you need to add the iwl3945 and iwlwifi_mac80211 modules to /etc/modules

sudo echo iwlwifi_mac80211 » /etc/modules sudo echo iwl3945 » /etc/modules

And now stop the ipw3945 and dependencies from loading by blacklisting them sudo echo blacklist ipw3945 » /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist sudo echo blacklist ieee80211 » /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist sudo echo blacklist ieee80211_crypt » /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist sudo echo blacklist mac80211 » /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist