In order to celebrate New Year in a bit geeky way I decided to rid på IBM Thinkpad x60s of yet another blob that have been irritating me for a long time, the blob provided by ipw3945d. Instead I installed the completely open iwlwifi driver (note:only needing the binary ucode as some have pointed out). For future reference here is a short writeup of what I did.

First rid your system of the binary blobs:

emerge -Cv ipw3945d ipw3945-ucode

Get ready to install iwlwifi by reconfiguring your kernel and ensure the following options are enabled:

CONFIG_MAC80211=m

And then recompile your kernel. Note that you need a pretty recent kernel to have the new mac80211 stack .

As iwlwifi is still masked we have to unmask it by editing /etc/portage/package.unmask:

net-wireless/iwlwifi
net-wireless/iwl3945-ucode

Also they are still not stable so we also have to edit /etc/portage/package.keywords:

net-wireless/iwlwifi ~x86
net-wireless/iwl3945-ucode ~x86

At last I only have a 3945ABG card, lspci output shows:

Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)

So I enabled ipw3945 and disabled ipw4945 by editing /etc/portage/package.use:

net-wireless/iwlwifi ipw3945 -ipw4965

Now we're ready to emerge iwlwifi:

emerge -va iwlwifi

Now for somw reason udev rename the master interface to eth2 as shown in by dmesg output:

udev: renamed network interface wmaster0 to eth2

As long as you don't reconfigure udev your real interface will be named wlan0_rename. I worked around that problem by commenting out the following line in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:18:de:73:9b:c5", NAME="eth2"

Then your real interface will be named wlan0. This appears currently undocumented on the Gentoo Wiki HARDWARE ipw3945.

For network setup and wpa_supplicant you just have to substitue wlan0 for eth2:

sed -i -e "s/eth2/wlan0/g" /etc/conf.d/net

Ensure that the iwl3945 module is loaded at bootup:

echo iwl3945 >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

Then update init scripts and you're ready to reboot:

rc-update del default ipw3945d
rc-update del default net.eth2
cd /etc/init.d
rm net.eth2
ln -s net.lo net.wlan0
rc-udpate add default net.wlan0
reboot

Enjoy networking with one blob less and Happy New Year!