Atheros AR5418 Wireless using madwifi in openSUSE & SLED SP2

If you are using Atheros AR5418 Wireless PCI Express Adapter then you can use the Madwifi driver package from the development trunk for the AR5008 family to get your Wireless up and running. Ths madwifir driver package supports the AR5418 chipset. This means you can directly use the Wireless native drivers without having to use ndiswrapper and Windows XP Drivers.

You need to install the Kernel Source and header files, the GNU Compiler, make utility and SVN client packages before we proceed to download and install the madwifi driver package from trunk.

opensuse11:~ # yast2 -i gcc make kernel-source kernel-headers kdesvn

This should install the relevant packages prior to install the madwifi drivers.

Download the latest madwifi package from the trunk to your current directory (better create a directory like madwifi and download into that directory as follows):

opensuse11:~ # mkdir madwifi
opensuse11:~ # cd madwifi
opensuse11:~/madwifi # svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk

This should download the latest madwifi package into the newly created madwifi directory.

Install Madwifi

Now, change to the downloaded trunk directory and install as follows:

opensuse11:~/madwifi # cd trunk
opensuse11:~/madwifi/trunk # make && make install

This should compile and install madwifi wireless package for you.

Now, insert the installed Atheros Wireless module as follows:

opensuse11:~/madwifi/trunk # modprobe ath_pci

This should insert the module and get your Wireless up and should enable you to configure the wireless device from the Network Manager.

SuSE Enterprise Linux SP2 (SLED SP2) x86_64 (64bit)

In SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED SP2) x86_64 (64-bit), the following changes to the Makefile.inc and net80211/ieee80211_crypto_ccmp.c under the trunk directory is neccessary to get installed properly.

Edit the file Makefile.inc and look for the line

WARNINGS = -Werror -Wall

and remove the entry “-Werror” so it looks like

WARNINGS = -Wall

Similarly, edit the file ieee80211_crypto_ccmp.c under trunk/net802111 directory and go to the line number 343 (in vi use this command :343 to go to the line 343)

and change it from

crypto_cipher_encrypt(tfm, &sg_dst, &sg_src, AES_BLOCK_LEN);

to look like

//crypto_cipher_encrypt(tfm, &sg_dst, &sg_src, AES_BLOCK_LEN);

Now, install as explained earlier to install smoothly.