How to checkout and install madwifi experimental driver for ar5008

The madwifi developers recently checked in a new branch in their repository, madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10. Here there is experimental support for the AR5008 chipset that have worked fine for me, but there are no guarantees ;)

To install this driver you'll need to compile it from source, and get it from the madwifi repository using svn. Compiling requires kernel headers.

• create a directory to hold your files, I use ~/driver/madwifi/

user@box:~$ mkdir driver/madwifi

• change directory to the new directory

user@box:~$ cd driver/madwifi

• We now need to fetch the files using svn:

user@box:~/driver/madwifi$ svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/branches/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10
A    madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression
A    madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/ccmp
A    madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/ccmp/test_ccmp.c
A    madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/regression/tkip
[ ... continues for a bunch of files ... ]
U   madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10
Checked out revision 2250.

• Now enter the directory and start compiling:

user@box:~/driver/madwifi$ cd madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/
user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ make
Checking requirements... ok.
Checking kernel configuration... ok.
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-4-686/build SUBDIRS=/home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10 modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.18-4-686'
  CC [M]  /home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/ath/if_ath.o
  CC [M]  /home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/ath/if_ath_pci.o
[ ... compiling a buch of files ... ]
gcc -o wlanconfig -g -O2 -Wall -I. -I../hal -I.. -I../ath_hal  wlanconfig.c
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/user/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10/tools'

• With a little luck, you now have a properly compiled driver, ready for install.

To do this you'll have to gain superuser privileges, either by su-ing to root or by using sudo if that's configured.

user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ sudo make install

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

user@box:~/driver/madwifi/madwifi-hal-0.9.30.10$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

• In my setup this worked. There are bound to be steps I've missed, and alternate ways of doing this, but this worked for me.