Compiling MADWIFI on Fedora Core 4

I’ve been helping a friend of mine get acquainted with Linux. Since I’m most familiar with RedHat I pointed him to Fedora Core 4. It’s always great to see the excitement from people when they realize they don’t need Microsoft to survive in the computing world.

One of the first things my buddy did was purchase a wireless card for his laptop. The standard ethernet interface didn’t appear to work correctly so we’ve been struggling to get the wireless drivers installed. Doing all this with no internet connection drastically complicates matters. That means no yum!

The following is a mini tutorial on installing MADWIFI from source assuming there’s an internet connection available, but I’ll also provide links to download the necessary RPMS that can be burned to CD from another machine.

You must have root access to do the following:

1. The first thing I had to do was check out the project. Realizing I didn’t have subversion, I had to install it using the following command yum install subversion. If no connection is available then download the rpm from here and install it using rpm -i subversion-1.2.3-2.1.i386.rpm.

2. I was then able to check out the source issuing the command svn checkout http://wvn.madwifi.org/trunk madwifi-ng. This will download the source code into a folder called madwifi-ng. You can also download a zip of the latest code snapshot here.

3. Now you can cd into the madwifi-ng directory using cd madwifi-ng.

4. Compile the code using the make command. Simply type make and hit enter. You might run into a problem here if your KERNELPATH environment variable isn’t set. Mine wasn’t, so I had to explicitly set it using the following commands:

KERNELPATH=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.11-1.1369_FC4-i686/
export KERNELPATH

Your kernel version may vary so be sure to set this properly according to your version.

5. I tried running make after setting my KERNELPATH and then received the following error:

Checking requirements… FAILED
The ‘uudecode’ tool was not found on your system. Please make sure it is installed in your PATH, then try again.

6. I had to install the sharutils package using yum install sharutils. Or the rpm can be downloaded from here and installed using rpm -i sharutils-4.2.1-27.i386.rpm.

7. After that I was able to run make successfully. You should see a ton of code compilation messages fly across your screen. It’s pretty cool looking and lets your friends believe you actually know what you’re doing.

8. Now type make install and you should have a successful installation.

Since I did this on a machine that doesn’t have a wireless NIC I’ll have to leave the rest up to Matt and refer him to the “Creating an Interface” section of this link: http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo.

Best of luck Matt and let me know if you have any questions!