How to install ATHEROS drivers for wireless card

by Carlos Peraza on Feb 21, 2005 (Updated 2005-02-23)

I had success installing my airlink101 AWLC4030 Super Gâ„¢ Wireless Cardbus Adapter. This device uses the atheros drivers which in linux are called the madwifi drivers and as you can see you can get these packages from atrpms. If you have this repository in your yum.conf you can install via yum and a dependency will be needed to install the drivers. The dependency is installed according to your kernel version and please note that everytime you upgrade the kernel you also need to upgrade the madwifi-kmdl.

For example I amusing kernel 2.6.10.760 in fedora core 3:

[cap@myfc3 ~]$ uname -r
2.6.10-1.760_FC3
[cap@myfc3 ~]$

Which requires me to install this dependency first: madwifi-kmdl-2.6.10-1.760_FC3-0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3.at.i686.rpm

so I ran this yum command:

# yum install madwifi-kmdl-2.6.10-1.760_FC3-0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3.at.i686.rpm

once this is installed you can run yum command:

# yum install madwifi

and this is the result:

Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package madwifi.i386 0:0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3.at set to be installed
--> Running transaction check

Dependencies Resolved
Transaction Listing:
Install: madwifi.i386 0:0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3.at
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
madwifi-0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3 100% |=========================| 2.4 kB 00:00
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: madwifi 100 % done 1/1

Installed: madwifi.i386 0:0.9.4.12-15.rhfc3.at
Complete!

We are not done you may run into some issues like I did.  My wireless was SLOW so I asked for help and this was the SOLUTION!

You may also need some extra tools to monitor your wireless connection and in this tutorial you can learn how to do it.  Gkrellm a system monitor for linux has a wi-fi monitor for your ath0 device.  Here is my wireless configuration:

[cap@myfc3 ~]$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0
# Please read /usr/share/doc/initscripts-*/sysconfig.txt
# for the documentation of these parameters.
IPV6INIT=no
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=no
GATEWAY=
TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=ath0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NETMASK=
DHCP_HOSTNAME=
IPADDR=
DOMAIN=
ESSID=
CHANNEL=6
MODE=Managed
RATE=auto
[cap@myfc3 ~]$

I created this little how to in my laptop as I am wireless connected! One quick tip I make the NetworkMangerInfo start during my login by adding it to session > startup program.