Intel Wireless WiFi Link 5100 iwlagn with Kubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

So I upgraded my Toshiba A300-07F from Kubuntu Linux Jaunty Jackelope 9.04 to Kubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10.

As I mentioned in the post linked above, I had issues with the wireless card, which is an Intel 5100, using the iwlagn driver. I had to download the driver from the Linux Wireless web site, compile it, and get the firmware from Intel's web site.

I had to do something similar on Karmic: download and compile the drivers. What I did not do is download the firmware, since the version that ships with Karmic is the same as the version on Intel's web site, so one less step here.

Hardware description

Here is the output from lshw for reference:

# lshw -C network
description: Wireless interface
product: Wireless WiFi Link 5100
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
logical name: wlan0
version: 00
serial: [redacted]
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes 
  driver=iwlagn 
  driverversion=2.6.31-14-generic 
  firmware=N/A 
  ip=192.168.0.10 
  latency=0 
  link=yes 
  multicast=yes 
  wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn
resources: irq:30 memory:d4700000-d4701fff

Installing the updated drivers

And here are the steps I went through to get wireless to work:

First download the 2009-10-28 version of the drivers.

Then compile and install as follows:

tar xjf compat-wireless-2009-10-28.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless-2009-10-28
make
sudo make install
sudo shutdown -r now

Wicd

I also found that wicd is more helpful than KDE's network management Plasmoids, has a more comprehensive and easy user interface, and supports the encryption schemes in wireless better (WEP, WPA, ...etc) without having to manually configure them in wpa_supplicant by hand editing the configuration file.

Problem after suspend

There is one more snag to overcome: when I ask the laptop to suspend, wireless does not work after a resume.

To solve this issue, I created a file called /etc/pm/config.d/01iwlagn, and put this in it:

SUSPEND_MODULES="iwlagn"

This makes wireless behave normally after a suspend/resume.