I’ve been trying for some time use Elisa media center on Fedora but it seams that Elisa is too elusive for Fedora. Current version on Elisa home page is 0.5.12 but if you install Elisa on Fedora 9 you will get much older 0.3.2, even bigger issue is that Elisa doesn’t work because of some broken dependencies.
 
You can look at Fedora Bugzilla; more specifically look at bugs #446051 and #429590.
 
So I guessed that there will be some “break my Fedora box” packages in F9 updates-testing repos, but unfortunately there were none :(
So I booted Fedora 10 beta - this is the bleeding edge Fedora so I thought there had to be new Elisa package in F10, but guess what? Fedora 10 also has old Elisa 0.3.2 which doesn’t work.
 
I also tried manually getting packages from freshrpms testing repo, I downloaded and saved all the rpm packages and tried to install them but there were some unmet dependencies :(
 
I tried installing pigment-python-0.3.8-1.fc9.i386.rpm but that packet needs libpigment-0.3.so.8, libpigment-gtk-0.3.so.8 and libpigment-imaging-0.3.so.8 but pigment-devel-0.3.9-1.fc9.i386.rpm packet provides only so.7 but no so.8 libraries…
 
I hope these issues will get sorted out as soon as possible. I’m willing to test Elisa packages and help that way so that working and updated Elisa gets into Fedora 10 repositories.
 
UPDATE:
I found out how you can install elisa on Fedora 9 thanks to thm on #fedora-devel irc channel, and it isn’t too hard.

First you need to setup freshrpms repository; just copy the code below, but you need to remove [ ] around etc because my blog has protection that prevents me to write that path.


su -
cat < /[etc]/yum.repos.d/freshrpms-testing-elisa.repo
[freshrpms-testing-elisa]
name=Freshrpms Testing (elisa)
baseurl=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/testing/$releasever/elisa/$basearch
gpgkey=http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/RPM-GPG-KEY
enabled=1
EOF
 

and then just install elisa:
 

yum --enablerepo=freshrpms-testing-elisa install elisa

Links:

• Elisa home page
• Bugzilla bug #446051
• Bugzilla bug #429590
• Freshrpms testing repository

 
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

Na ovogodišnjem Defconu održano je paralelno wifi natjecanje u dometu signala; Defcon Wifi-Shootout. Postignu rezultat od 200 km stvarno je vrijedan svake pohvale tim više što nisu dobili jedva neki signal nego punu brzinu od 11Mbita!!! Koristili su ne tako standardnu opremu poput satelitskih tanjura promjera cca 3m :) Svaka pohvala ekipi iFiber Redwire jer je ovo stvarno izuzetan poduhvat koji svima nama koji se bavimo wifi tehnologijom daje inspiraciju da i sami eksperimentiramo. Baš me zanima što će napraviti nagodinu. :)

Ima čak među samoproglašenim guruima wirelessa onih koji ni kabel ne znaju skripmati kako treba, nećemo ih sada spominjati :) Njima, a i svima drugima dobro će doći ovaj link. Gore su video tutorijali za krimpanje konektora na koaksijalne kablove koje koristimo u bežičnim mrežama (pigtailovi).
UPDATE: Ako želite nakrimpati “običan” lan kabel (CAT-5) onda vam preporučam ovu odličnu stranicu. A na ovome linku naći ćete puno informacija o kabelima, konektorima i svemu i svačemu…

Od danas više nema BSD ogranka madwifi modula za atheros bežični čipset pod linuxom. BSD ogranak (branch) je spojen s MAIN ogrankom, pa se time zapravo ukida MAIN ogranak. Ako želite odmah skinuti zadnju CVS verziju modula to možete klikom na ovaj link.