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 completly 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 rutine it misses a few things IMHO. I have addressed the problems I ran into here.

A part 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 ofcource. 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 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.