I bought a new Gateway MP6954 Laptop yesterday and decided to give Linux another go. This time I told myself: I’m not even going to attempt to run any Windows applications using Crossover Office or anything else. I’m just going to go with what works best: httpd, Tomcat, Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Oracle, MySQL, etc.
I installed Fedora Core 5 again (kernel build 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp) from the same CDs I used last time and it installed and came up cleanly, but with no wireless support. There is very little documentation about running Linux on my particular laptop model, but the wireless hardware (Intel Centrino/Pro Wireless ipw3945) is fairly commonplace and, according to the many sources I referenced, it’s “well supported” by Linux. Intel even offers a driver for it, but it’s a source-only distribution.
According to the install guide for the driver, I first needed to download and compile the IEEE 80211 subsystem. I later found out that in most cases, doing so is a bad idea. Compiling the subsystem (version 1.1.14) and then the driver (version 1.1.0) led to runtime incompatibilities — “Invalid Module Format” was the exact error. However, against the 80211 module included with the 2.6.15 kernel source, the driver wouldn’t even compile. So I was in a bind.
I needed to find an IEEE 80211 subsystem that was compatible with the 1.1.0 version of the driver. The answer was actually more simple than I thought. All I needed to do was upgrade to the latest FC5 kernel 2.6.17, install the latest kernel sources (yum install kernel-devel) and then build the driver from there. These are the instructions I followed.
And just like that, I had wireless support for my new laptop under FC5. Now only if I could get the sound card working . . . .