How to checkout and install madwifi experimental driver for ar5008
The madwifi developers recently checked in a new branch in their repository, madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10. Here there is experimental support for the AR5008 chipset that have worked fine for me, but there are no guarantees ;)
To install this driver you'll need to compile it from source, and get it from the madwifi repository using svn. Compiling requires kernel headers.
- create a directory to hold your files, I use ~/driver/madwifi/
user@box:~$ mkdir driver/madwifi
- change directory to the new directory
user@box:~$ cd driver/madwifi
- We now need to fetch the files using svn, or you could get the nightly snapshot:
user@box:~/driver/madwifi$ svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/branches/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10 A madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression A madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/ccmp A madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/ccmp/test_ccmp.c A madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/tkip [ ... continues for a bunch of files ... ] U madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10 Checked out revision 2250.
- Now enter the directory and start compiling:
user@box:~/driver/madwifi$ cd madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/ user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ make Checking requirements... ok. Checking kernel configuration... ok. make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/build SUBDIRS=/home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10 modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686' CC [M] /home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/ath/if_ath.o CC [M] /home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/ath/if_ath_pci.o [ ... compiling a buch of files ... ] gcc -o wlanconfig -g -O2 -Wall -I. -I../hal -I.. -I../ath_hal wlanconfig.c make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/tools'
- With a little luck, you now have a properly compiled driver, ready for install.
To do this you'll have to gain superuser privileges, either by su-ing to root or by using sudo if that's configured.
user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ sudo make install
- Now all that's missing is probing the module and we should be set.
user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ sudo modprobe ath_pci
- In my setup this worked. There are bound to be steps I've missed, and alternate ways of doing this, but this worked for me.