I had a horrible time with wireless when I upgraded to Mandriva 2008.1. I never found an answer online, but I met a Linux developer who told me that it was a problem with Intel's driver used with the kernel (2.6.24) and there was no clean way to install another driver.* So I went back to Mandriva 2008.0 - better the bugs I know, and can deal with, than wifi that doesn't work much of the time.

Question: Is this card, Intel's ABG3945, now working with the latest kernels? Can anyone tell me the the minimum version number I should be using? I want to upgrade to Mandriva 2009.0 (kernel 2.6.27) but might try other distros as well.

Thanks!

* Information that still seems to not be online, curiously - oh for a good wiki for Linux end-users.


Btw I looked at OpenSolaris, suggested by a friend from Sun. I gather the Linux kernel versions don't apply, but since the last stable release is from May, around the same time as the problematic Linux distros, I'll avoid it for now.

The 3945 has been a bit of a moving target for the devs. Especially those distros that do "releases" that effectively freeze kernel levels. Don't know about Mandy, but it's certainly true of Ubuntu.
I would expect later releases to work fine - hopefully using the iwlwifi driver that has been merged into the mainline. The distro still needs to ship the (Intel supplied) microcode though.
Try a liveCD if it's offered and see.

Update: just for interest I pulled the latest Ubuntu beta for Intrepid. Running as a liveCD it found the 3945 fine - doing this update using it. As an aside, Fedora 9 has no issues either.