[CentOS] ipw3945 wireless not working

Wed Mar 5 17:17:16 UTC 2008
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

Progress...

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 9:30 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
>   
>> This is a new Centos 5.1 install on a HP nc2400 (that use to run XP).
>>  Completely clean install; blew away the XP partitions...
>>
>>  After applying all the updates, and configuring for the rpmforge repo, I
>>  used yumex to install dkms and the dkms-ipw3945, ipw3945-firmware, and
>>  ipw3945d rpms.
>>
>>  lsmod|grep ipw    shows:
>>
>>  ipw3945          180391   1
>>  ieeee80211      33417   1   ipw3945
>>
>>  and dmesg)grep ipw   shows:
>>
>>  well a bunch of lines about the card including one with the Radio
>>  Frequency Kill Swithc is On
>>
>>     
>
> Check to see if the physical switch is turned on. As long as the
> system thinks the Kill Switch is on it won't show up in Network
> Manager. [Having spent an hour debugging this a couple of months ago.]
> Basically it comes down to the first question of support: Is it
> plugged in? At the moment the computer does not think so.
There is NO physical switch. XP had some way of enabling the radio. So I 
went into the bios and played around a bit. Tried an option and now 
NetworkManager sees the card!

But when I enter my WPA passphrase, I keep going back to being asked for 
the passphrase :(

I noticed that NetworkManager is using eth1 for the the wireless 
interface, not wifi0 that I put into modprobe.conf (alias wifi0 ipw3945).

I tried to use wpa_supplicant deamon as I do on my nc4010 that has an 
atheros pci card. man wpa_supplicant lists ipw as a valid device, but 
when I supply this, i get

Unsupported driver 'ipw'

SO why does it not like my passphrase that works just fine with my 
nc4010 and its ahteros card? Granted theweak passphrase I am using fails 
password checkers, but still.....

Or how to use wpa_supplicant instead of NetworkManager (which is pretty 
cool, where is its config files).