Madwifi

A driver to get your Atheros-based WLAN-card working under linux. Supports monitor-mode and works well with kismet. Since the driver is still in beta-state, there are some known problems. Adhoc-mode, for example, doesn't work and the performance in lossy environments is not that good. The readme says that "all these problems are to be fixed in future revisions", though.

System requirements

 * WLAN interface that uses Atheros chipset
 * a current kernel version of series 2.4 or 2.6
 * wireless extensions version 14 or later (version 16 is preferred)
 * target kernel needs to have sysctl support turned on
 * crypto API support turned on with HMAC and MD5, if you want to use the 802.1x authenticator
 * hotplugd, if you want to use a Cardbus card
 * the utility uudecode is also needed during compilation

Getting the current version
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/madwifi \ co madwifi

Or go here for daily and old CVS snapshots.

Installation
Just use make make install and to load the modules modprobe ath_pci

To be sure everything works, take a look at your dmesg output. It should contain something like this: ath0: 11b rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps ath0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps ath0: H/W encryption support: WEP AES AES_CCM TKIP ath0: mac 5.6 phy 4.1 radio 1.7 ath0: Use hw queue 1 for WME_AC_BE traffic ath0: Use hw queue 0 for WME_AC_BK traffic ath0: Use hw queue 2 for WME_AC_VI traffic ath0: Use hw queue 3 for WME_AC_VO traffic ath0: Use hw queue 8 for CAB traffic ath0: Use hw queue 9 for beacons Debugging version (ATH) ath0: Atheros 5212: mem=0x11000000, irq=9

That should work on most systems. For more detailed and distribution-specific instructions take a look at the Madwifi Documentation Wiki or the included readme.

Debian users should also take a look at this page, which provides Debian packages and a madwifi repository.