u l t r a m o o k i e

I switched my notebook from CentOS 4 to Fedora Core 6 (”Would I switch over to FC6 on baremetal? Nope.” Can I have a “take back” please?) I got bored with CentOS 4 (it is stable, it is conservative, and it works…But, on a desktop system, it just wasn’t fun…) CentOS 4 still powers my two servers, which I won’t change anytime soon.

Anyways, the configuration for my wifi network (which runs WPA) was not that bad with FC6. It is not as involved as with CentOS 4. But, I still wanted to document it for myself. The madwifi instructions are here. NetworkManager is already installed with FC6, so that makes things a lot easier to configure. It really boils down to:

• Add the ATrpms signing key: rpm --import http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
• Add ATrpms to your repos by adding this file /etc/yum.repos/atrpms.repo:

[atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/fc$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
includepkgs=madwifi madwifi-kmdl* madwifi-hal-kmdl*


• Install madwifi drivers: yum install madwifi madwifi-kmdl-`uname -r`
• Update /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias ath0 ath_pci
options ath_pci autocreate=sta

• Turn on NetworkManager: /sbin/chkconfig NetworkManager on
• Reboot

Enjoy!

Update: The “includepkgs” in the atrpms.repo will limit updates to only those three packages. This will allow you to keep atrpms enabled when doing upgrades. This is good for when there are kernel updates and you do not want to have other packages from atrpms installed, but still want your wireless networking to work — and keep all your updates only from Fedora Updates.