Hi! I’m posting to release a fast and furious tutorial to bring your wireless lan active in a few minutes.

I assume that you have a kernel release >= 2.6.24. The iwlwifi driver (we need it) has been merged into mainline kernel since 2.6.24.
Run uname -r command to know your kernel version.

Ex.
$ uname -r
2.6.26-1-686

If your kernel is < 2.6.24, you have to upgrade your kernel.
If your kernel is >= 2.6.24 simply load iwlwifi module with modprobe as root user (to become root user use su command at command line and insert root’s password):

modprobe iwlwifi

Is your wlan led turned blue? It’s right. Your wlan is active.
Now you can configure it with ifconfig or you can create an adeguate configuration in /etc/network/interfaces file. If you need help simply use man interfaces command.

Uhm, but I think you need a basic config to use at home with WPA encryption… you don’t have time to read / search / study… that’s so strange!! 😀

So that’s it: edit /etc/network/interfaces (you need root privileges) and put this at the end of file.

#IW
# uncomment next row if you want your wlan active at startup
#auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up (echo 'Modprobing iwl4965') && /sbin/modprobe iwl4965
post-down (echo 'Removing iwl4965') && /sbin/modprobe -r iwl4965
wpa-ssid YOURNETNAMEAKASID
wpa-key_mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-psk "yourpassphrase"
wpa-driver wext

With this config you can easy bring up/down your wlan with ifup wlan0 or ifdown wlan0 as root user.

Note: in order to use wpa you need to install a package called wpasupplicant. Install it with apt-get install wpasupplicant as root user.

Have a nice day!