Atheros hacking

Now I have Linux on, I will be downloading stuff and patching stuff so I want some connectivity. Wired ethernet works OK on my U810 with OpenSuSE 10.3 - some people have reported acpi issues but I have it enabled with no problems. However, this is a mobile device so I want to get wireless working.

I got the U810 in the USA and the Atheros WiFi chipset therefore has brain damaged firmware that restricts you to channels 1-11 for 802.11b/g. This is, of course, completely stupid for a device designed for mobility so it needs to be fixed but it appears that firmware updates are not exactly thick on the ground.

A bit of trawl takes me to Tamosoft who have something called CommView for WiFi which, if I was using Windows, seems to be quite a nice WiFi monitoring/analysing app. along with some other network tools. However, there is also an Atheros firmware adjuster mentioned on this page. You'll need to download the CommView for WFi trial to run it but it works. So now I have channels 1-13 (or 14 if you select a Japanese locale).

So there was a reason I kept that Vista partition about...

Now to get the Linux Atheros drivers, which aren't included in OpenSuSE because of licence conflict issues with Atheros' binary-only HAL. The madwifi guys are working on the problem but in the meantime, the OpenSuSE site has these instructions which do the trick.

The madwifi one-click-install also adds the OpenSuSE online repository to the software repository list. This contains all the stuff on the DVD and more so, now I have it in, I go into Yast and disable the DVD as a software source - that way, if I download anything that needs the DVD it will go to the online repository instead which is fine now I have WiFi working.