I am running debian lenny (64bit, 2.6.26 kernel) on a dell D830 that has
an intel 4965 wireless device.
I started using compat-wireless-2.6-old in the hope that it would help
with connection stability issues I was having on some networks.
older versions of compat-wireless-2.6-old (at commit
c69eab63a99699566501604b7ea78293b04f248f) work fairly well for me, but may
be contributing to kernel panics.
Releases of compat-wireless-2.6-old newer than that do not work. There is
a build problem that I worked around but cannot fix (I needed to put
iwlagn-y += iwl-4965.o in iwlwifi/Makefile in order for the iwlagn module
to include the 4965 code). The real problem is that I cannot associate to
any AP. scanning works, but dmesg reports that authentication times out.
This happens on A and B/G frequencies, and for wpa and open networks.