Debian Sarge on IBM X40 howto - Part 6: Wireless (Take 2)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found out that I had been using a completely wrong driver for my wireless card. The juice for my card is a Multiband Atheros Driver for WiFi (MADWIFI). I found a Debian specific driver compile guide on their homepage.

It is a good guide but for Debian users with less tech-knowlegde and routine it misses a few things IMHO. I have addressed the problems I ran into here.

Apart from the packages mentioned in the guide I was missing shareutils (providing uudecode), lib6-dev and sysutils to follow the guide and avoiding error messages of course. The missing uudecode was beginning to give me grey hair (in an age of 24 that is not a good sign). The warning (error) message was hidden in the output code many lines before the make-file actually worte ‘Error’ and exited:

apt-get install sharutils lib6-dev sysutils

I’m using Debian pre-compiled kernels (at the writing time a 2.6.7-1) which tricked me a bit. I used the make-kpkg --append-to-version "-686" --revision 2.6.7-1 which is wrong!

Instead, use (look in the guide to know where and when):

make-kpkg --append-to-version "-1-686" --revision 2.6.7 --config old configure
make-kpkg --append-to-version "-1-686" --revision 2.6.7 --added-modules madwifi modules_image

Writing this post in my weblog on my laptop sitting in my bed without any wires connected at all - Now everything is forgiven and forgotten.