Intel Pro Wireless 3945

[Oliver Ruebenacker]

     Dear friends,

  I am writing this in great distress. I have now been trying for
weeks to get my Intel Pro Wireless 3945 working on my Dell Latitude
820 under Fedora. I tried Fedora Cora 6 and Fedora 7 Test 4.

  I really need my wireless and this is becoming a personal disaster
for me. I have spent many hours. I have written various messages to
this forum. Some replies I got said it is simple and gave
instructions, but the instructions did not make it work. Others said,
they too did fail.

  Yesterday, there was an update available regarding ieee-whatever.
Since then, NetworkManager actually asks me for a network key, which
is progress, but it still can not connect.

  And while trying, I can not help but think: If NetworkManager was a
well-written piece of software, it would give me the option of
actually saving the network key, and reviewing it. It would give me a
progress report and an understandable error message. And it would not
be that the only way to access Network Manager is to click on some
icon (when I type /usr/sbin/NetworkManager in a terminal, nothing
visibly happens).

  This has already caused me great damage, and I am not sure what to
do next: Keep trying? Abandon Fedora? Abandon Linux altogether?

  Two or three weeks ago, I was convinced that I would use Fedora for
the next months or years, then maybe Fedora or some other popular
Linux distro, and that free software is the future. Now I am not so
sure any more.

  Because what will continue to happen is that new things will keep
coming up - hardware, protocols, java classes - and then there will be
commercial software supporting it available immediately, while the
free software community will struggle for months to come to terms with
it.

     Take care
     Oliver

-- 
Oliver Ruebenacker, Post-Doc Researcher
Theoretical Biological Physics and Soft Statistical Mechanics
Cell Biology at UConn Health Center and Physics at Harvard
http://people.deas.harvard.edu/~oliver/