[CentOS-docs] New Wiki Page

Sat May 9 19:10:56 UTC 2009
Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com>

On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 02:19:38PM -0400, David Dreggors wrote:
> 
> >> Madwifi, is a packaged driver as well but will not work for me as I need
> >> the latest madwifi snapshot. The madwifi package that comes with and in
> >> fact has to be removed does not work for my hadrware.
> > 
> > Did you try ath5k or kmod-ath5k (comes from 2.6.18-144.el5) ?
> 
> The install comes with "madwifi" right out of the box I believe. The 
> CentOS 5.3 installer uses the right driver but it does not seem to work. 
> So I then download and compile the latest snapshot 
> ("madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r4016-20090429.tar.gz").

I repeat---the normal MadWifi does NOT work with the AR5007, aka AR242x
card.  There was some discussion somewhere--you can try MadWifi ticket
1192, I think that's the one--I believe the ticket is mentioned in the
wiki article.  

At least one of the other distros, Fedora, had a 3rd party rpm--I've
forgotten if it was Livna or rpmfusion, that did include a MadWifi rpm
that did work with the card.  However, a standard MadWifi rpm, that is,
one based on whatever they were shipping, wouldn't have worked with that
card. 

> 
> As to kmod-ath5k I had never heard of this module and in fact even after 
> latest updates my kernel is "2.6.18-128.1.10.el5". So that would be a no 
> , sorry.
> 

It's not widely mentioned yet.  There is an elrepo repo---they ought to
fix that name <ducks>, as elrepo.repo seems awkward, but at any
rate...it's mentioned on the wiki in the 3rd party repos section.  It's
relatively new, and this driver was just made last week or so, (the
makers can correct me on that, as I'm too lazy to look at the emails
from them)  :), so it's not too surprising that you hadn't heard of it. 

As I mentioned, *I've* had some minor issues with it, but I think Dag
and someone else have used it without problems.  

Sigh, someone should put mention of how to try it on the AR5007 wiki
page.  Basically, in a nutshell, unload the ath_pci module, then 
you cd into the MadWifi snapshot untarred directory, which you have
hopefully kept.  Type make uninstall, unblacklist ath5k in
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and reboot.  

At this point, the card, which had been ath0 will now be seen as wlan0.

The issue that I've had is that when shutting down wpa_supplicant
(either manually or on system shutdown) it throws a kernel panic, making
it necessary to manually shut off the machine with the power button.  

I haven't researched it very deeply though and it's quite possible that
it only does that on my lowend laptop. 
 


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Scott Robbins
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