CentOS:Atheros driver with hassle

Yeah I made it with hassle.why?

1. because the damn D-link, wifi-card manufacturer did not mention any chipset for their products. and they use different chipset for each hardware version of product. u can not expect to have an atheros driver in card version C, when version A has Atheros chipset. have to spent 1-2 hours to figure out the which cards have atheros driver. To get the info for wifi cards chipset, u can go here.
2. The CVS server for Madwifi is down, so I have to find other way to do it. Grab the howto from three different distros to make my own.

This will be unofficial. I found some error in it, but still can work fine.

Some Info About My System
# uname -a
Linux salji 2.6.9-34.0.2.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Jul 7 19:52:49 CDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

# lspci | grep Ath
04:03.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5005G 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

Howto: Install Atheros Driver Into CentOS 4

1. Get the source code. I use rpm for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
   # wget http://dl.atrpms.net/all/madwifi-0.9.2.1-29.at.src.rpm
2. Install the source code
   # rpm -ivh madwifi-0.9.2.1-29.at.src.rpm- it will install files which is located in
   1. /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/madwifi-0.9.2.1.tar.bz
   2. /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/madwifi-0.9.2-rhel4.patch
   3. /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/madwifi.spec
3. Extract the source code file to proper location
   # tar jxvf /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/madwifi-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2 -C /usr/src
4. Compile and install the driver
   # cd /usr/src/madwifi-0.9.2.1
   # make
   # make install
5. edit /etc/modprobe.conf. add these lines; this is to insert the module during system boot
   –> alias ath0 ath_pci
   –> options ath_pci autocreate=sta
   –> alias wifi0 ath_pciThe module should be automatically inserted when reboot from now on.
6. To insert the module use this command (we do it manually, because we do not want to reboot our system).
   # modprobe ath0
7. check your device, if it exist or not:
   # ifconfig ath0– if successful, u get output something like this:
   ath0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:13:46:E4:C2:02
   inet6 addr: fe80::213:46ff:fee4:c202/64 Scope:Link
   UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
   RX packets:6794 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
   TX packets:5306 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
   collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
   RX bytes:929049 (907.2 KiB) TX bytes:609509 (595.2 KiB)

Ok. the howto is not complete yet, because you have to configure your device to get associated and given ip address. You can edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 to do it OR if you don’t want more headache, open the MENU, go to Application >> System Settings >> Network to configure it.