Madwifi
Contents
Multiband Atheros Driver for WiFi
Linux driver for 802.11a/b/g universal NIC cards - Cardbus, PCI, or miniPCI - using Atheros chip sets.
The following adapters sold by IBM use the Atheros chips:
- IBM Dual-Band 11a/b Wi-Fi Wireless Mini PCI Adapter
- IBM 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter
- IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter
- IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II
- ThinkPad 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini Express Adapter
- IBM 802.11a Wireless LAN Cardbus Adapter
- IBM 11 a/b/g Wireless Cardbus Adapter
Project Homepage
http://www.madwifi.org (old page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi)
Packages
- daily cvs snapshots: http://madwifi.otaku42.de
- Debian Packages: http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/madwifi
- Debian Packages: http://www.users.tpg.com.au/sigm/misc/madwiki.txt
- Fedora Packages(1): http://rpm.livna.org
- Fedora Packages(2): http://www.atrpms.net/name/madwifi/
CVS
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi co madwifi
Installation
- Make sure that you've got sysctl support and the net/radio enabled (wireless extensions) in your kernel. Install the driver with make & make install
- further more you like to install the wireless tools from wireless tools. Make sure the versions fit together by
$ iwconfig --version
Setting up wpa_supplicant with wpa-psk.
Status
in development, usable
OpenSource HAL
The "official" driver consists of an opensource wrapper with binary HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). This HAL is not a binary firmware like with the Intel Wireless chips, but a piece of code that needs to runs in the Linux kernel.
The vendors reasoning behind this is, that since the Atheros chip could be tuned to any frequency, and hence interfere with systems operating in those frequencies, that we simply need to accept this binary module.
Obviously this binary HAL is unacceptable to the Linux kernel developers, and the Atheros driver in this state will never become part of the official kernel.
Some OpenBSD developers facing the same issue, reverse engineered the binary HAL and have produced an OpenSource version. Hopefully a driver based on this might be included with the Linux kernel at some point in time, and picked up by the mainstream distributions.
