Wireless on HP Pavillion dv6871us in Debian Lenny - Intel PRO/Wireless 4965 AGN

1 - Install your card's firmware

You can run lspci to find out your hardware and then googling to find out what firmware. e.g.

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network Connection (rev 61)

So, on googling for "intel 4965 wireless +firmware +Debian". You can also fire-up Synaptic and search for "intel wireless" using the description and name search flag.

Please install the following:

# aptitude install firmware-iwlwifi

1-A # modprobe iwl4965

2 - Run netapplet, wifi-radar, or... or restore /etc/network/interfaces

Always keep backup of /etc/network/interfaces handy. When you install Debian, the 2nd thing you do is restore a few particular files. You rename the originals like this:

# mv /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.bak Then you copy my keeper version in its place.


3 - # /etc/init.d/networking restart

Sometimes "interface wlan0 not ready" happens. You just run:

# iwlist scan

and it becomes a non-issue.

4 - Enjoy wireless


Here's the /etc/network/interfaces on my Debbox (using DHCP):


# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-essid MakeTeaNotWar

auto wlan0

For static it would be like:

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth1

iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.1.102
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
wireless-essid xxxxxxxxxx
wireless-key xxxxxxxxxx
auto wlan0

You can put dns info in this file or not, but it seems kinda redundant to me...you have /etc/resolv.conf for that. If you get a problem like - no route....then open resolv.conf and use openDNS nameservers:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Just comment out the other entries -- like your ISP's domain and all that. Likely your system is using your router for DNS nameservers.