When I got the Wireless working on this laptop (a Lenovo T61), I was using Linux kernel 2.6.25. I remember that it was quite a pain, because the iwlwifi stuff had only just stabilized enough to replace the (now deprecated) ipw stuff. One of the things I didn’t get working at the time was Monitor mode.

Now, I’m upgrading to kernel 2.6.29, and there have been some changes to the kernel configuration for the iwl4965 driver. CONFIG_IWL4965 is now a suboption of CONFIG_IWLAGN. The wireless didn’t work on the first boot however. eth0 didn’t work either. But, when I changed the wired driver from “Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet” (CONFIG_E1000) to the same for PCI-express (CONFIG_E1000E), it did work on the next boot and the wireless magically started working too. 😕

I was surprised because I don’t see what the wired and the wireless driver have got to do with each other. Also, before, I’ve always successfully used the non-PCI-express driver for my wired Ethernet interface and I’m so old fashioned that I can’t imagine either way that my hardware uses something so modern as PCI-express. 😛

Anyway, it works now. I’ve gone from kernel 2.6.25 to 2.6.29 and everything seems to be working. I still have to find out how to get Monitor mode working though.

One final thing I noticed is that upgrading net-wireless/iwl4965-ucode created an extra entry in my world profile: net-wireless/iwl4965-ucode:0. I wonder what that is for.