TOPIC: Enabling Airport Extreme

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Download Location
All files mentioned here are available from YDL.net Enhanced at the following location: ftp://ftp.ydl.net/enhanced/betas/airportextreme

Unfortunately, due to legal reasons, we cannot provide the firmware for the bcm43xx, you must download that from a 3rd party server. The topic of #bcm43xx on irc.freenode.net usually has the best place to get it from if the link in FIRMWARE_DOWNLOAD doesn't work for you.

Installation Instructions

1. Install the new kernel and udev

   su -c 'rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.16-1.ydl.1.ppc.rpm'
   su -c 'rpm -Uvh udev-084-3.ppc.rpm'

2. Download and Extract Firmware

   The firmware download location is in the FIRMWARE_DOWNLOAD file. (please note, this is a third party location, TSS does not distribute the bcm43xx firmware, only points you to it)

   bcm43xx-fwcutter ./wl_apsta.o

   You will now have the following files:

   	bcm43xx_initval01.fw  bcm43xx_initval07.fw    bcm43xx_microcode4.fw
           bcm43xx_initval02.fw  bcm43xx_initval08.fw    bcm43xx_microcode5.fw
           bcm43xx_initval03.fw  bcm43xx_initval09.fw    bcm43xx_pcm4.fw
           bcm43xx_initval04.fw  bcm43xx_initval10.fw    bcm43xx_pcm5.fw
           bcm43xx_initval05.fw  bcm43xx_microcode11.fw
           bcm43xx_initval06.fw  bcm43xx_microcode2.fw

   Put them in /lib/firmware.

3. Reboot

Usage Instructions
The bcm driver is a tad more difficult to setup than other drivers, and the order is more important.

/sbin/modprobe bcm43xx
/sbin/ip link set eth1 up
/sbin/iwconfig eth1 essid $YOUR_ESSID key $YOUR_KEY channel $YOUR_CHANNEL rate 11M

You may have to run kwifimanager to get the card to associate with your Access Point. Once the your card has associated with an access point, you can run dhclient or use ifconfig/route to bring up the network.

As a note, it is often useful to put the above commands, preceded by "rmmod bcm43xx" annd followed by the networking commands you require in a script to quickly reset the network interface since it is still beta software and tends to be not very reliable.

This HOWTO was written by Owen Stampflee, Terra Soft Solutions