Dean Christakos« Pedestrian Traffic Report for Boston, part 2 | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
February 7, 2005
Getting Wireless to Work Under Linux with a Thinkpad X31
As I discussed earlier, I have recently acquired a Thinkpad X31. For research purposes, I placed a Linux partition on the machine and installed the Fedora distribution on it. My Thinkpad has a built-in 802.11a/b dual-band wireless card which unfortunately does not have drivers available that come packaged with my Linux distribution. My model uses the Atheros 5211 chipset for wireless which required me to get ahold of the MADwifi driver. The documentation was pretty long-winded, so here is the short version for how to get your Atheros-based wireless hardware functioning:
First, most of these projects in trying to get your incompatible wireless hardware working involve acquiring the Wireless Tools for Linux software. Fedora users will note that this is included in their distribution, so no worries there for me.
Next, get the MADwifi software. There aren't any official releases available on Sourceforge, yet, but you can download a copy of the source from the MADwifi daily CVS snapshot archive.
After that, it's simple. Do a "make install" to compile for your current kernel version, and then type "modprobe ath_pci" to get it started.
To get this all started on bootup, just add
alias ath0 ath_pci
to /etc/modules.conf, and in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, create the file "ifcfg-ath0" with the contents
DEVICE=ath0 ONBOOT=yes BOOTPROTO=dhcp
assuming you're using DHCP for your wireless, which most of us do, anyway.
Specifics of how to set different options in the driver and how to compile and recompile for different kernel versions is covered in the sourcecode README.
Other resources:
Posted by Dean at February 7, 2005 2:41 PM