MadWifi is a group of volunteers working the driver for the wireless LAN device on Atheros chipsets for the Linux kernel. There are currently three of these drivers, MadWifi, ath5k and ath9k, the latter being the official version of Atheros for the community.

MadWifi is one of the best and most advanced WLAN drivers for Linux. The driver itself is open source but it depends on HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) which owns and is only available in binary form.

ath5k is the new version of the driver which does not depend on HAL. This version seeks to replace the MadWifi driver for Linux systems and is where the group is concentrating its resources.

As I said earlier, ath9k is the newest of the three, and its initial development was done by Atheros who then released the source code completely to the community. ath9k supports all 802.11n chipsets from Atheros.

Installation of the driver with module-assistant

MadWifi packages for Debian Linux are supported officially in the repositories out under non-free. Currently there is support for Sarge, Etch and Lenny or stable, testing and unstable.

In the project's official website recommends the use of the tool module-assistant (ma) for the installation of the modules madwifi. This tool automates the steps of;

  • Preparation of the sources / headers kernel
  • Unpack the tarball module
  • Compile
  • Create binary modules of the package for Debian
  • Installation and cleaning 


  deathbian: ~ # apt-get update 
  deathbian: ~ # apt-get install madwifi-source 
  deathbian: ~ # apt-get install madwifi-tools 
  deathbian: ~ # ma prepare 
  deathbian: ~ # ma ai madwifi


Charge modprobe ath_pci module typing. To verify that the
And that's it, just reboot and the kernel and will support the Atheros card and wireless surfing has been said. But what happens when we update the kernel of Debian and lost support for the wireless card?

Recompile and install the Atheros driver for the new Kernel

I happened to several versions of the kernel you to upgrade your system, Debian also upgrade to a new stable version of the Linux kernel and I lost the support of the WLAN.

To fix this, we started our Linux with the previous version of the kernel module compiled in support for Atheros wifi. Also we can connect to the Internet via the network card eth0, and run; 


  deathbian: ~ # apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-1-686


This command downloaded from repositories sources of the new kernel installed, in this case 2.6.24-1-686. Then reboot with this kernel and run the installation script.

To ensure that loads the module to restart the system can enter ath_pci echo>> / etc / modules, if that does not load the module automatically at startup.

Via | MadWifi

Popularity: 26% [?]