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Page Contents Author Introduction Notes Prerequisites Installing the latest stable Madwifi driver

Author

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)
www.billgiannikos.com

Introduction

While Ubuntu 7.10 already includes the Madwifi driver, this driver is under constant development and your wireless card may require a later version than the one included in Ubuntu. Here we will guide you in the necessary steps in installing the latest Madwifi drivers.

Notes

While this guide is mainly focused to laptop users there isn't any difference for desktop users.

Prerequisites

You should run a full update for your installation of Ubuntu to ensure you have all the latest packages installed.

Installing the latest stable Madwifi driver

Here are the steps in installing the latest Madwifi drivers

1. Download the latest Madwifi driver from http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/GettingMadwifi. In this guide we are going to use madwifi-0.9.4.tar.gz as at the time of writing these are the current ones.
2. Load up a terminal window if you are in the graphic interface.
3. Type in the following to install gcc and the kernel headers:

4. Move to the /usr/src/ folder with:

5. Extract the contents of the file you downloaded with:

Remember to replace the "/path/to" in this command to the path of where your file is.

6. Move into the newly created folder with

7. Now start the building process with:

This will take a while.

8. Delete the older Madwifi driver with

9. And finally we install these drivers with:

10. Reboot your computer and the newer Madwifi driver will be used.