I just installed a new kernel on my thinkpad. The migration was done from a 2.6.23 kernel and brings a new 80211g driver: iwl3945.

This new driver is fully included in the kernel and only need an additional firmware, which can be found in firmware-iwlwifi Debian package. It works pretty well, seems to connect faster, but the blinking WIFI antenna on my laptop doesn't work anymore. It replaces ipw3945 with a daemon in user space.

The installation was not straightforward, since ipw3945 and udev persistent net rules prevent it. The solution is to remove lines concerning the net interface using ipw3945 (the line "# PCI device 0x8086:0x4227 (ipw3945)" and the line after) in the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules. After this, you must do:

modprobe -r iwl3945
modprobe iwl3945

The file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules now contains a line for the iwl3945 driver.

Installing the driver for etch requires to update the package wireless-tools using its backport to etch and downloading/installing the package firmware-iwlwifi from unstable.