Arch Linux

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

New FOSS Atheros driver (madwifi fork) now in kernel26mm

kernel26mm 2.6.23.rc3.mm1-1, now in the unstable repo, includes the initial code from the ath5k.org project, which aims to provide

a completely FOSS Linux driver for Wireless LAN Atheros AR5000 chipsets for inclusion in the stock Linux kernel as part of the LinuxWireless effort.

This is a fork of the well-known Madwifi project.

Anyone who feels like testing this should note the generally unstable nature of the -mm kernel, and also the entirely unreleased, pre-alpha status of the ath5k code itself. Even the website still says 'Coming soon!' under Get the Code.

I will have a go myself as soon as I get a chance to re-install my Atheros card, which has been in mothballs for a while.

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: New FOSS Atheros driver (madwifi fork) now in kernel26mm

I know that's 2 months old, but I just got a new toshiba satellite pro with a wifi atheros chipset.
I was disappointed to see that madwifi doesn't seem to support it, the module just fails to bring the interface.
So I tried the kernel26mm, and I got a wlan0 interface But I got a kernel Oops when I tried to associate

I just tried to edit the PKGBUILD for getting 2.6.23-mm1, but I miserably failed, because there are too may differences between rc and non rc kernels.
Maybe I'll try with kernel26 as a base then.

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: New FOSS Atheros driver (madwifi fork) now in kernel26mm

I built 2.6.23-mm1 yesterday, and I'll put it in unstable shortly. Hope it works for you....

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: New FOSS Atheros driver (madwifi fork) now in kernel26mm

Oh cool, thanks, I checked the diff on the PKGBUILD, I think what I was missing is the ARCH=$KARCH part
But I also checked the diff on the config, and I saw ATH5K disappeared. I'm stupid. For some reasons, I assumed there would be a better ath5k driver in the last mm, and I didn't even check the changelog.
ath5k is temporarily disabled in this version :

+git-wireless-ath5k-broke.patch
ath5k broke somehow, probably a marge glitch

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/p … roke.patch

In any cases, I'll try out the new mm, I like playing with it from time to time, and I'm curious if this last version still make my laptops hardlock when leaving X :d

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

shining

Pacman Developer

Registered: 2006-05-10

Posts: 2,043

Re: New FOSS Atheros driver (madwifi fork) now in kernel26mm

Well, I got the wireless-2.6 git branch reading the instructions there :
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/ath5k

But it seems like that ar5007eg chipset (apparently wrongly reported as ar5006eg in lspci) is not supported by ath5k.
I can just hope it'll be in the future.

I saw many users reporting success with ndiswrapper, but I didn't have any luck yet.

Edit : not sure what I was doing, finally it's very easy and straightforward with ndiswrapper and it works perfectly.

Last edited by shining (2007-10-21 14:24:23)

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pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))