Fedora Core 5, madwifi and wpa_supplicant

Upgraded my x86_64 laptop to FC5 recently. That broke my wireless, due to FC5's wpa_supplicant not shipping with madwifi support (that's not really suprising).

madwifi ticket 462 includes a patch for madwifi to add WEXT support (the Linux standard wireless extensions), so that it works "out of the box" with plain wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager. I updated my dkms-based packages to include this patch and it works fine. I have i386 (untested) and x86_64 rpms available. You'll need to update /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant to specify INTERFACES and DRIVERS, otherwise wpa_supplicant will use the wrong interface and driver type. E.g.:

INTERFACES=ath0
DRIVER=-Dwext

NetworkManager currently doesn't seem to work quite right. It negotiates WPA-PSK correctly with my access point, but somehow doesn't seem to get a DHCP-assigned address. It works fine with wpa_supplicant.