[PLUG] Lenovo T61 and Intel 4965 wireless

drew wymore drew.wymore at gmail.com
Fri Oct 26 03:15:08 UTC 2007


On 10/25/07, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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.


John,
I don't have a T61 (drool) but I have encountered my share of weird
wireless  problems on my own laptop.  So hopefully some of these tips will
help or point you in the right direction.

First: The light on the lid, I had the same problem with my Acer Aspire, it
had to do with ACPI not being loaded, I was actually disabling it on purpose
to troubleshoot and found it was required for the wireless nic to function,
when ACPI loaded the light on the lid would come on regardless of whether or
not it was associated with an access point or not, just sort of a "hi i'm
alive" mode. So that might be something worth looking into.

I googled this bit
http://osdir.com/ml/linux.arch.general/2004-10/msg00173.html which was what
I was thinking in terms of getting the laptop to associate with an open AP
(no wep) its entirely possible to do so I'm not sure why the network manager
doesn't allow you to configure this.

Hope this helps or gets you pointed in the right direction.

Cheers!
Drew-



More information about the PLUG mailing list