Installing Madwifi on Fedora Core with WPA

From Robert Marcano's personal website

In order to use Atheros based cards with WPA you will need to install the MadWiFi kernel module. I recommend the usage of the prebuilt modules found on livna repository. If you do not have this yum repository please add it as explained on livna configuration page. From Fedora Core 5 all other required packages are included.

The easiest way to use WPA is to use NetworkManager, to be sure everything is installed execute (or use the graphical package installer):

yum install NetworkManager kmod-madwifi

then activate NetworkManager:

chkconfig NetworkManager on
service NetworkManager start

[edit] Fedora Core 4 and previous versions

If you are not using Fedora Core 5, the steps are others; first, the wpa_supplicant package is needed and it can be found on my yum repositories compiled with MadWiFi drivers support.

To install the packages after setting up the repositories execute:

yum install kernel-module-madwifi madwifi wpa_supplicant

Now reboot your computer, Kudzu will detect it and will install the new network interface named ath0.

Since I only use a WiFi network at home, I edited the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ath0 in order to not make the interface start on boot, setting ONBOOT=no. Please note that the interface configuration can be made using the Fedora provided graphical tools.

At this time, you can have network access only without encryption or using the broken WEP standard. In order to use the access point with WPA, it is needed to setup wpa_supplicant. Edit the /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file to suit your network. The only change I made was to remove all the sample network entries and added only one like this:

network={
  ssid="your ssid"
  psk="network shared key"
}

Remember to set the ssid and the psk (preshared key) to the same values of your access point

This configuration by default will try to access the network using WPA-PSK (WPA Pre Shared Key) and will negotiate the required cipher (I am using AES)

In order to start the network interface I created a script with the followings commands (I am using a local DHCP server at home, but it must work with your ISP DHCP server)

wpa_supplicant -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -iath0 -Dmadwifi -B
dhclient ath0