Madwifi-ng drivers for Eee PC

Santa (in the form of my girlfriend) brought me Asus Eee PC 701 for Christmas '07. It was (and still is!) a beautiful machine. I always wanted to have small, lightweight Linux notebook to play with all the different wireless networks out there. I was pretty excited then to put my hands on Eee PC, but it's really hard to describe my disappointement when I realized that wifi drivers shipped with default Xandros don't support packet injection. So I proceeded to compile my own drivers with packet injection support. The task turned out to be more difficult than I initially though, but after a few days of code hacking and endless recompilations I came up with working madwifi-ng drivers for Eee PC. I shared my drivers with folks on a Eee PC forum. To my great surprise, many people found it very useful, and started using it. Even after a year since publishing it, I still get around 200 downloads a month. It probably means that many people are still using the default Eee PC Xandros installation and find my drivers useful (heck, I'm still using them myself). Hence, I decided to create this web page to make it easier for people still using it to contact me if they need any help.

Installation

All you have to do is to download my new drivers for Atheros and use them. Be aware that this will work only with a stock 2.6.21.4-eeepc kernel that was originally shipped with your Eee PC 701.

You can get the drivers from here: http://obfusc.at/ed/eeepc/modules.tar.gz  (4.5 MB)

I tarred my whole /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc directory, but you probably only need drivers in atheros/ and net/ directory. Anyways, here is the recommended way to do it if you didn't install any additional modules since you bought your Eee:
1. Go to /lib/modules and backup your existing directory:
$ sudo cp -ar 2.6.21.4-eeepc backup

2. Unload your current drivers from the kernel:
$ sudo modprobe -r ath_pci
$ sudo modprobe -r wlan_scan_sta
$ sudo modprobe -r wlan_wep

3. Download the above file from my site, and overwrite your 2.6.21.4-eeepc with the content of my package.
$ sudo tar xfvz modules.tar.gz
... whatever additional steps are needed.

4. Load new drivers:
$ sudo modprobe -i ath_pci

5. Start your interface:
$ sudo ifconfig ath0 up

After that you should see your wifi0 interface if you do:
$ sudo iwconfig


If you want to use Kismet, in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf edit the following line:
source=madwifi_g,wifi0,MyAtheros

And that's it. Everything should work as before, but you have new drivers with monitoring and packet injection support now. Have fun.