Need Opinions on 3945ABG Wireless Card

[DW]

Hi All,

Just found out that the evaluation Thnkpad T60 I got (before we order 9 
more) has an Intel 3945ABG wireless card for which there is no driver 
yet. I don't know how easy it would be to order the other T60's w/ 
alternate 11a/b/g cards (Atheros chipset, which I am told should work), 
and would rather not rock the boat at this time.

I've done a lot of research and have found that Damien Bergamini is 
still involved in developing the driver for the 3945ABG, although he is 
focusing his efforts on OpenBSD. On May 14th, he committed it into 
OpenBSD as the wpi(4) driver.

I suspect that there will be enough of us here who will need support for 
these 3945 cards, so I'm feeling that even if these laptops show up up 
next month, and have to sit in boxes for several weeks (probably would 
anyway, we're so busy with other things), I might be ok as far as having 
driver support into FreeBSD by that time, even if it's a matter of 
patching or installing a firmware port (like for iwi and ipw).

What do you all think? What are the chances of getting burnt? Sure we'll 
still have our old trusty Orinoco pcmcia cards if worse comes to worse, 
but I really don't want to have to do that again. That's what happened 
on the T30's when we went to 5.4 and the driver for the cisco aironet 
was broken.

Since I'm on this subject, I'm still struggling with sound on the T60 -- 
some have pointed to patches for the Hi Def driver, but it seems that 
mine is even newer (g), and haven't had success here either. It seems 
like this is evolving rapidly though, and will probably get better as 
more folks pick up the newer Thinkpads and others w/ this audio card. 
Opinions?

Other than those two things, I still think the T60 is a damn fine piece 
of hardware, and installing 6.1 was easy, X was the easiest ever (Intel 
graphics accelerator card, which I was nervous about at first, since we 
always had the widely used radeon cards before, but it xorg picked it up 
w/ no problems and handled the display superbly).

Thanks again for any input.