[PLUG] Lenovo T61 and Intel 4965 wireless

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Oct 26 02:42:49 UTC 2007


Re my new T61: I am having a few issues, of which the only showstopper
is wireless.

Several of you witnessed the birthing of this computer at the Clinic
Sunday. After I installed Gutsy amd64 and got everything pretty much
running, I discovered that wireless was not working. After 20 minutes
of poking at stuff we discovered that the physical switch on the front
of the computer was turned off. Duh! After turning it on wireless was
working fine at Free Geek. I could swear that the wireless light on the
lid was lit up at the time, but can't be 100% certain.

On Tuesday I went to PSU. Wireless would not work. The wireless light
was not lit up (and I have not seen it lit up since). I poked at
everything I could think of, but nothing would get the wireless
working. I took the laptop to the computer lab in the basement of Smith
and a kind Linux expert spent 15 minutes trying to get it working, but
without success. She sent me to "The Cat" in the computer science
building. 

At "The Cat" a fine young fellow (who demonstrated absolute dominance
of the Linux OS and its command line) managed to get wireless working.
To do so he added a couple of lines to /etc/networks/interfaces and ran
"dhclient wlan0." I thought the matter was handled. Today I went to PSU
again. At first I was unable to connect, but after five minutes of
poking in Network Manager I managed to get connected. My connection
lasted for about half an hour, at which point I was suddenly
disconnected. I was unable to get reconnected, so I went back to "The
Cat." The same fine young fellow was there and he spent about 45 minutes
trying to get it running, without success.

1) The chip is working fine, i.e., it is not a hardware failure.

2) When I go to System > Administration > Network and select the
wireless, then Properties, it is set to Roaming Mode. I can uncheck
Roaming mode, but to get the change to stick I have to enter something
in the Network Name (essid), the Password Type, and the Password boxes.
Otherwise, when I click on OK it just goes back to Roaming Mode. After
much searching I discovered that Roaming Mode means "look for a
network." It is interesting to note that in Password Type the choices
are WEP key hexadecimal, WEP key ASCII, and WPA Personal. There is no
option for "unencrypted," which is apparently what PSU wants. More
interesting is that the dropdown for the essid box does not display any
available networks, although the two times I did have wireless working
it did display a dropdown list.

When I run "sudo dhclient wlan0" it fails to find any connections. I
have also installed Kwifimanager, and it fails to find any connections.
Thinking that my problems might be caused by a conflict in
Kwifimanager, I uninstalled it and rebooted, but still no joy.

The modules are iwlwifi_mac80211 and iwl4965. I can modprobe them and
they seem fine. They are listed as loaded in lsmod.

So T61 users, does your wireless work? If so, what distro/architecture
do you have? What is the wireless chipset (mine is Intel 4965)? I need
more suggestions.



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