Requirements

Hardware

Wireless Card

• A PCI/miniPCI or Cardbus card with an Atheros chipset.
• Please refer to Compatibility on which wireless cards are supported by the MadWifi driver.

Architecture

• Please refer to Architecture for the list of supported systems for MadWifi.

Software

• root privileges for the machine on which you intend to install MadWifi.
• For Debian, Ubuntu and related systems run as root: apt-get install build-essential perl
• For Red Hat, Fedora and related systems run as root: yum install gcc make perl
• Generally, make sure you have gcc, libc headers, make and perl

Kernel

• Linux Kernel 2.4.23+ and 2.6.x series
  • Others may work, but are unsupported; also, beware if using the very latest release candidate (RC#) kernel as it may not yet be supported
• Kernel Source and Headers of running kernel
• No module versioning support
  • option CONFIG_MODVERSIONS
• Wireless Extensions support in kernel
  • v14+ required, v17+ recommended; option CONFIG_NET_RADIO (kernel 2.6.22 and later: CONFIG_WLAN_80211)
• Sysctl support in kernel
  • option CONFIG_SYSCTL
• Crypto API support in kernel
  • option CONFIG_CRYPTO
• HMAC support
  • option CONFIG_CRYPTO_HMAC
• AES support (for WPA networks)
  • option CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES

Use the kernel config guide to help set these kernel options.

Building the driver

• gcc -- The same GCC version used to compile the kernel
  • otherwise, "Invalid module format" errors may occur
• subversion -- If you choose to get the most recent MadWifi code, you'll need to check it out of our Subversion repository.
• make -- Used to automatically build programs.
• perl -- Used by Madwifi Makefile to generate code
• madwifi -- Download the latest MadWifi driver.

Configuring the wireless card

• iwconfig -- Used to connect to a wireless network; often called wireless-tools by distributions.
• wpa_supplicant -- Used to join a network with WPA encryption; often called wpasupplicant by distributions.

Please check your Linux distribution for more specific information.