Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself, but first I would like to explain why wireless drivers aren’t working on Eee PC running Fedora 9.
 

Asus Eee PC uses Atheros wireless chip AR5007. Atheros as a company doesn’t support linux and doesn’t make linux drivers available, there are linux drivers but they are made by madwifi project crew. Atheros company doesn’t make any effort in making their wireless chips work on linux; they hide specifications of their wireless chips and don’t make them available to linux developers. It is amassing that a developers around madwifi project actually succeed in making these drivers considering all the obstacles. Madwifi drivers still needs Atheros binary HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
 

This HAL is not binary firmware but a piece of code that needs to run in the Linux kernel. It consists of header files for which no permisison to modify is granted, and pre-compiled object files. The vendor’s position is that the Linux community simply needs to accept this sourceless HAL, since in principle the Atheros chip could be tuned to any frequency, and thus produce RF interference with systems operating in those frequencies. This binary HAL is unacceptable to the Linux kernel developers, and the madwifi driver in this state will never become part of the official kernel.
 

Some OpenBSD developers, facing the same issue, reverse-engineered the binary HAL and have produced an open source driver (ath5k), which has now been picked up by the madwifi team as the future direction. At the same time the madwifi driver has been labeled ‘legacy’ to reinforce this point.
 

So we have two drivers that support Atheros chip based wireless cards; madwifi and ath5k, but neither of them currently supports the chip that Asus choose for Eee PC – AR5007. That is now true, you say, my Eee PC runing Xandros linux has a working wireless! If you weren’t aware Xandros uses NDISwrapper to load windows drivers (to learn more look at NDISwrapper article on Wikipedia). So Xandors is using windows and not linux wireless drivers.
UPDATE: I checked with lsmod and Xandros also uses madwifi (ath_pci) driver. They have also custom patched the driver to work.
 

athk5 driver is under heavy development and it is now known when it will support AR5007. Madwifi has a patch that adds support for AR5007, but unfortunately this patch cannot be committed to madwifi, since it breaks the ABI for all non-i386 HAL binaries.
 

In order to get your wireless working on Eee PC with madwifi you need to patch the driver manually so here is step by step walktrough:
Update: Im this tutorial I will show you how to download patched driver and compile it yourself.
 
Update 2: If you don’t wan’t to compile the driver manually then you need to configure Livna repository and then just issue yum command to install the driver.
As root do this:
rpm -i http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
yum --enablerepo=livna-testing install kmod-madwifi
 

If you still want to do it manually and perrhaps learn how to do it then you need to install all necessary packages; as root do:
yum install make binutils gcc glibc-devel glibc-headers libgomp patch kernel-headers kernel-devel wget
 

Then blacklist the ath5k module; edit your blacklist file (as root) in \etc\modprobe.d\blacklists (I have to reverse slashes because mod_security on this blog that prevents writing \etc\ with regular slashes) and add the line with “blacklist ath5k”
echo "blacklist ath5k" >> \etc\modprobe.d\blacklist (reverse the slashes)
 

You should also edit your \etc\modprobe.conf to look like this:
## Start Atheros Stuff
alias wifi0 ath_pci
alias ath0 ath_pci
options ath_pci autocreate=sta
## End Atheros Stuff
 

Download patched madwifi driver:
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007.tar.gz
 

Extract madwifi source code and compile it:
tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gz
cd madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007
make
su
make install
 

That is it, after reboot you have a working wireless under Fedora 9.
 

Links:

• Madwifi project
• madwifi Support for AR2425 (AR5007EG) chipset
• ath5k developers mailing list
• Madwifi page on ThinkWiki
• Fedora Eee PC Wiki page

Udruge Linux-Osijek i Osijek Wireless pozivaju sve zainteresirane na predavanje i linux radionicu:

Pozivamo sve zainteresirane na predavanje i radionicu koja će se održati u četvrtak, 15. 5. 2008. u CnC Klub za Mlade (Strossmayerova 68 – blizu Rokove crkve) s početkom u 18h.
Linux distibucija Fedora 9 izlazi dan prije, stoga ćemo imati prezentaciju novih i najzanimljivijih stvari u Fedori 9. Nakon prezentacije Fedore 9 dijelit ćemo besplatne instalacijske medije Fedore 9 i Ubuntua 8.04 te još neke stvari koje će za sada ostati iznenađenje. Ako vas zanima što će to biti, morate doći i sami vidjeti. ;) Samo ćemo vam reći da ponesete svoje USB stickove. ;)

Nakon prezentacije i dijeljenja poklona kreće praktični dio, odnosno install fest. Kako je radionica već popunjena nemamo više mjesta za one koji bi željeli doći na praktični dio radionice i sami instalirati linux na svoje računalo. No svi zainteresirani mogu doći pogledati radionicu i naučiti kako se vrši instalacija tako da poslije i sami mogu instalirati linux kod kuće . Ako želite doći ili na bilo koji način prisustvovati; bilo samo pokupiti poklone, gledati prezentaciju ili naučiti kako se instalira linux, svakako se prijavite putem emaila: info@linux-osijek.org

Google karta – http://tinyurl.com/6rhwge
Karta – http://tinyurl.com/5pf54a

Link na stranicu udruge Linux-Osijek:
http://www.linux-osijek.org/node/14

This is a short post regarding my experience installing and using Fedora 9 (currently preview, not released version).
I have tried installing eeedora on 8GB SD card for many times but without any success. I have successfully run eeedora from my usb stick but when I tried installing it on SD card it failed while trying to copy files from USB stick to SD card.
I have external DVD burner so I popped in Fedora 9 Preview. To my surprise, after bad experience with eeedora, installation went smooth. I had some issues with LVM crashing anaconda but after I manually created partitions with fdisk and rebooted Fedora 9 it was installed without any problems. After partitioning the only issues were the GUI ones – anaconda installer just doesn’t fit in such a small screen. I hope that can be fixed before Fedora 9 ships.

Here is how Fedora 9 boot screen looks like on Asus eee:

 
Fedora 9 wallpaper looks great on eee, much better than on my big 19″ screen. The issue here is that “Install fedora” icon is visible but the text beneath isn’t. If you don’t know exaclty what you are looking for it is hard to start the installation. Here is how Fedora 9 looks on my Asus eee:

Here is how Anaconda Installer looks like like on eee:

As you can see the buttons aren’t visible in Anaconda installer.

 
When I used “create default partition layout” with LVM this is the error I got:

I tried saving this bug but save button freezes Anaconda, so I couldn’t save the bug report.

These all are just small cosmetic bugs and I’m overly impressed how great Fedora 9 works on my little eee! I can’t wait to use it in my daily routine because Xandoros has lots of limitations compared to Fedora.