No Wifi on my Fed9 system

Okay, who's pinched my WiFi?

I've just installed Fedora 9, dual-boot with XP Pro, onto my work Laptop, a Dell Latitude D620 and almost the first thing I noticed that wasn't quite right was the Wifi wasn't working.

Wired works fine. But that's not too convenient, seeing as how its the middle of the school summer break and my kids (three of them) are queueing (or fighting) for the use of our home desktop PC, which is in the study. And guess where the router is? I can fend one of them off with our other laptop, but that still leaves two of them permanently glued to MSN, Bebo, MySpace and Sims2 (all at the same time).

Okay, let's take a look at that Wifi...

My Dell uses an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG WiFi adapter.

I checked to see if the driver module, iwl3945, was loaded:

# modprobe -l iwl3945
/lib/modules/2.6.25-14.fc9.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/iwl3945.ko

Module loaded!

Next I made sure my wlan0 interface was activated:

# ifconfig wlan0 up

Okay.

Next I did a scan of my wireless neighbourhood:

# iwlist wlan0 scan

wlan0	Scan completed :
	Cell 01 -	Address: ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ
		ESSID:"BTHomeHub-1F93"
		Mode:Master
		Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
		Channel:1
		Quality=42/100 Signal level=-84 dBm Noise level=-127 dBm
		Encryption key:on
		Bit Rates:	1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s
			24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
			12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s
		Extra:tsf=00000038c00619b3
	Cell 02 -	Address: ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ
		ESSID:"home"
		Mode:Master
		Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
		Channel:6
		Quality=74/100 Signal level=-60 dBm Noise level=-127 dBm
		Encryption key:on
		Bit Rates:	1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s
		Extra:tsf=0000007987b81e95
	Cell 03 -	Address: ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ
		ESSID:"www.it-consulting-ccd.co.uk"
		Mode:Master
		Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
		Channel:11
		Quality=26/100 Signal level=-93 dBm Noise level=-127 dBm
		Encryption key:off
		Bit Rates:	1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s
			9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s
			48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
		Extra:tsf=00000005dcaf6580
	Cell 04 -	Address: ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ:ZZ
		ESSID:"Stan's Wireless"
		Mode:Master
		Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
		Channel:11
		Quality=31/100 Signal level=-90 dBm Noise level=-127 dBm
		Encryption key:on
		IE:	WPA Version 1
			Group Cipher : TKIP
			Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
			Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
		Bit Rates:	1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s
			6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s
			36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
		Extra:tsf=00000019c3820121

There are four networks (I've elided the MAC addresses), three of which belong to my neighbours (!) and one (ESSID:"home") is mine.

Now for the Network Configuration applet: System -> Administration -> Network.

I clicked the Hardware tab. It showed my wireless device as wlan0.
I clicked the Devices tab. It didn't show a wlan0 device so I created a new device by clicking New and following the wizard.

However I get an error when I try to activate the device.

Searching around the net (and the blogosphere) is seems there are a lot of folk having trouble with WiFi on Fed9 on Dell.

Watch this space for my occasional comical attempts to get this working...