Joys of Atheros

Have been playing with the Nokia 5800 and Joikuspot which turns the 5800 into an ad hoc wireless 3/3.5G router which is nice, very, very nice.

Except that ad hoc on the U810's Atheros is distinctly non-trivial. With the madwifi (now moved to http://madwifi-project.org) drivers, the athX devices are VAP's (virtual access points) created from the root device, wifi0 using wlanconfig . The important thing to realise is that the athX device only supports a particular wireless mode. By default (in OpenSuSE 11.0, anyway) this is sta which is workstation infrastructure mode and requires an access point. The Joikuspot network shows up in KNetworkManager but you can't connect.

Fair enough, you can create another VAP to support adhoc mode as madwifi allows you to have multiple VAP's which allows you to neat things like use your U810 as a wireless repeater or gateway. Except there's a bug - the one sort of VAP you that doesn't play nicely in multiple VAP configurations is adhoc. And judging from project discussions fixing adhoc is not exactly top of the priority list since it's not "enterprise" and anyway we're meant to be moving to the fully open ath5k driver anyway.

The alternative then, is to destroy the default sta mode VAP and create the adhoc one so it is the only one. To their credit, the madwifi website does document this all quite clearly although it does confuse KnetworkManager a little. Then all is good except, of course, I can't roam and connect to the vast majority of infrastructure mode access points out there until I reverse the process. I did start setting up a couple of scripts to switch between the two modes when I encountered another issue with adhoc VAP's which is that every so often I was getting a hard lockup and I mean power-cycle hard.

So it's off to Bluetooth DUN profile tethering for me for a bit (shame the 5800 doesn't have a PAN profile...). Which might turn out for the best, since Bluetooth power consumption on both the 5800 and U810 is much lower than for wifi. Not as elegant though IMHO :(.

P.S. ath5k doesn't even recognise the card.

P.P.S. I tried swapping the Atheros for an Intel Wireless PCI-E card in the U810. No dice - the BIOS looks for the Atheros and doesn't seem to enable the PCI-E slot if it's not there.