IPW3945 Wireless

Fedora 7 with the IPW3945 Wireless Adapter
When I install Fedora 7 on my laptop it's usually very simple to get wireless working. Since support for the IPW3945 is built in to the kernel all I need to do is to go to System > Administration > Services and restart NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatch. An icon appears in the top panel. Clicking that icon reveals all available wireless networks. I select my network and away I go. However, many many people, myself included, have had trouble getting wireless working on their laptops, regardless of the model of adapter. On my Toshiba laptop, I had trouble until I found this post, Keeler1's Amazing Wireless Help on Fedora Forum. I followed his steps for getting the IPW3945 drivers and was up and running in no time. Check out the link or read below. With his blessings I've copied most of that post here.

Getting ipw3945 isnt as hard as you first think.

1. Unpack the tar archive I included. This archive contains three files necessary to run it plus a shell script to update ipw3945 after a kernel update. The order in which the shell script removes the packages is crucial.

2. Use rpm -g to group install the three ipw3945 files included in the archive

3. modprobe ipw3945

4. Try to configure a network device and activate it.

5. If it works, great, but it probably wont. Should get an error saying it cant Set the Bit Rate

6. Open /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg- (replace network device name here with the name that it says in netwok manager) and change the last line which should say something like RATE='0 kbs' to RATE=Auto

7. Save the file and try to activate the device again. It should work.

That said, here's what I did to follow along. Download the attached (to his post) tar.gz file and move it to /opt
mv /home/glenn/Desktop/ipw3945wireless.tar.gz /opt/
Change to the /opt folder
cd /opt
Unpack the archive
tar xfvz ipw3945wireless.tar.gz
This leaves 4 new files in the /opt folder
dkms-ipw3945-1.2.0-1.noarch.rpm
ipw3945d-1.7.22-4.i386.rpm
ipw3945-firmware-1.13-1.noarch.rpm
update-3945
Before you proceed make sure you have the packages DKMS and GCC installed with this command
rpm -q dkms gcc
If they are not installed then install them like this
yum -y install dkms gcc
When that's done you can move forward with the wireless install. You are going to install the extracted packages with rpm's group install. Issue these commands.
rpm -i -g dkms-ipw3945*.rpm ipw3945-firmware*.rpm ipw3945d*.rpm
Then
modprobe ipw3945
Now try to configure a network device. At this point my wireless came to life. I was able to connect to my wireless router and the internet.