Archive for the ‘Wireless’ Category

Debian 4 and netgear ma 101

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

802.11b Wireless usb adapter

It does work / Funziona.

(Scriverò questo articolo in inglese così magari torna utile a più persone)

The netgear ma 101 works smootly under debian, but it requires a little of work to make it going.Y’ll describe my installation steps.

I started from a fresh Debian 4 testing install (codename lenny, kernel 2.6.22-3-686). Sources.list : default first cdrom and italian official debian mirror (only free packages).

To make this device work you need 2 things: at76-usb module and the firmware. In aptitude you can find at76-usb-source package module. If you look into package dependencies you’ll that firmware is required but non present (atmel-firmware isn’t into free debian repository). Please add this source

deb ftp://ftp.it.debian.org/debian testing main non-free

to your /etc/apt/sources.list or dowload the package directly from packages.debian.org. Install also package linux-source-2.6.22, and obviously install all packages that you need to build a kernel such as g++, ncurses-dev for menuconfig (or qt3-dev for xconfig or gtk for gconfig). Now you should have into /usr/src:

  1. at76-usb.tar.gz
  2. linux-source-2.6.22.tar.bz2

Unpack files, and you should have 2 more folders:

  1. modules
  2. linux-source-2.6.22

Please read Readme file into /modules/at76-usb but don’t run make now. If you do easily you will obtain an error that the kernel is not configured. You need to do 2 things

  1. export KERNEL_PATH=/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.22
  2. run a “fake”kernel configuration and compilation.I’m lazy and i din’t look into the make script of the module to see what it needed. I simply made an make menuconfig, saved and run a make inside kernel folder. In such way you can produce all config files needed by the module to compile.

Now the module will compile, but it will have incorrect versioning and it will not install with modprobe. You must copy /boot/config-2.6.22 into /usr/src/linux-source-2.6.22/.config .

Then you can enter /usr/src/modules/at76-usb and run make. make install will copy module at76-usb into the “wrong” folder: /lib/modules/2.6.22/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ .Please move the file from here to the correct place /lib/modules/2.6.22-3-686/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ . Run a depmod -a and finally modprobe at76-usb .

Congratulations, now your card should work.

(background music: 30 Seconds To Mars-From Yesterday / Chris Cornell - Arms Around Your Love)

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