I thought I would write a short summary of the way in which three laptops which I am reponsible for and running F7 now have excellent wireless support with three different drivers. For a long time I have been struggling with getting one laptop going on wireless using the rt2x00 driver recently supported in the kernel. On a second machine that was running FC6 and had an ipw3945 chipset support was solid with the ipw3945 driver and a real pain to get working in FC6 with iwl3945. This situation has now improved vastly. 1) Laptop 1 is a Dell d610 with iw2200 wireless. Until recently this was set up in F7 using standard WEP wireless and avoiding the use of wpa_supplicant or NetworkManager. Recently I tried to set up wpa_supplicant by editing the files /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant appropriately. I found to me delight that running wpa_supplicant either manually or as a daemon worked well, and all that was necessary was to run dhcient to get an ip address. In order to get it to run at boot it was necessary to change the line in /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant from # chkconfig: - 12 88 to # chkconfig: - 09 88 then I added two lines to /etc/rc.local /bin/sleep 2 /sbin/dhclient Now wireless comes up nicely at boot and connects seemlessly to the AP. 2) Laptop 2 is an old Amilo D6800 which has no internal wireless. I was using the rt73 legacy driver manually compiled until recently. This has no wpa_supplicant support. However recently the development of the rt2x00 driver in the kernel has had a module rt73usb but has not worked. However the new test kernel for 2.6.23 was installed and it was found that provided /etc/modprobe.conf had a line alias wlan0 rt73usb and in /etc/modules.d/blacklist the module rt2500usb is blacklisted then this modules works out of the box. Using the same technique as for the above I can now get this wireless to come up seemlessly in wpa_supplicant. 3) Laptop 3 is a Samsung Q35 machine running the ipw3945 chipset. In the latest released kernel for F7 the iwl3945 driver comes up seemlessly and using the same setup as in 1) wpa_supplicant also work very consistently in this machine. So this is the first time that all three machines run well using wpa_supplicant and it is important to thank all the many people who have worked hard at getting the kernel modules going, and also for the good work on wpa_supplicant that has made this possible. I am now looking forward to F8! -- mike cohler
