IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is deprecated, updated documentation can be found here

Madwifi is the recommended driver for Atheros based pcmcia, mini-pci and pci cards. Official web site is at http://madwifi-project.org.

Notes:

• You'll need uudecode from the sharutils package.
• The madwifi-old-r1417 patch should also work with newer version of the madwifi-old SVN.
• If you use wpa_supplicant, you should recompile it
• With the current madwifi-old, it is no longer needed to run iwpriv ath0 mode 2, since the driver allows injection in mode 0 using athXraw interface.

ifconfig ath0 down
rmmod wlan_wep ath_rate_sample ath_rate_onoe \
   ath_pci wlan ath_hal 2>/dev/null
find /lib/modules -name 'ath*'  -exec rm -v {} \; 2>/dev/null
find /lib/modules -name 'wlan*' -exec rm -v {} \; 2>/dev/null
svn checkout http://svn.madwifi-project.org/branches/madwifi-old/ madwifi-old
wget http://patches.aircrack-ng.org//madwifi-old-r1417.patch
cd madwifi-old
patch -Np1 -i ../madwifi-old-r1417.patch
make KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-<insert version>
make install KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-<insert version>
depmod -ae
modprobe ath_pci

It is now possible to set the transmit rate with madwifi (and also rt2570). The recommended rate is 5.5 Mbps, but you can lower it or raise it, depending on your distance from the AP. For example:

iwconfig ath0 rate 24M

When using attacks 2, 3 and 4, changing the number of packets per second sent by aireplay (option -x) sometimes helps getting better results; the default is 500 pps.