How to checkout and install madwifi experimental driver for ar5008

Official support for the AR5008/AR5418 chipset is expected in the upcoming 0.9.40 release of the madwifi-hal however, in the meantime, there is pre-release support with which some have found some success. In order to take advantage of the latest version of the code, you can either download the nightly snapshot, or use subversion as described below:

• make (if necessary) and change to a directory where you new directory

user@box:~/$ mkdir -p madwifi
user@box:~/$ cd madwifi 

• Fetch files using svn

user@box:~/madwifi$ svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/trunk
.
.
.
Checked out revision ####.

• Now enter the directory and start compiling:

user@box:~/madwifi$ cd trunk/
user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ make
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.
.

• With a little luck, you now have a properly compiled driver, ready for install. You'll probably be asked to enter the root password.

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ sudo make install

• Now all that's missing is probing the module and we should be set.

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

• This should result in two new interfaces being created "wifi0" and "wlan0":

user@box:~/madwifi/trunk$ /sbin/ifconfig 

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:15:58:86:70:EE  
          inet addr:192.168.0.119  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
          Base address:0x2000 Memory:ee000000-ee020000 
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:1420 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1420 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:182621 (178.3 KiB)  TX bytes:182621 (178.3 KiB)
wifi0     Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-19-7E-41-09-C1-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:462907 errors:753 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:182
          TX packets:563036 errors:6 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:199 
          RX bytes:91695661 (87.4 MiB)  TX bytes:846831037 (807.6 MiB)
          Interrupt:21 
wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:19:7E:41:09:C1  
          inet addr:192.168.0.102  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:316176 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:562494 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:54115716 (51.6 MiB)  TX bytes:823180275 (785.0 MiB)

It's wlan0 that you're after. Who knows what this wifi0 business is all about.