YDL.net

TOPIC: Enabling Airport Extreme

Introduction
This HOWTO will guide you through the steps of setting up Airport Extreme with YDL v6.x for Apple hardware. It was tested on an Apple PowerBook G4 1.67GHz running a fresh install of YDL v6.1.

This procedure requires 4 steps:

Install Development Tools, if not already installed.
Discover your Airport firmware version.
Extract the Airport Extreme firmware.
Configure your wireless card under Linux.

Install Development Tools
This procedure requires you to download and build the fwcutter extraction software. For this reason, you must have the "Development Tools" packages installed. This can be accomplished during the installation of YDL v.6.1 when you select to install the "Software Development" packages.
If this option was not selected during installation, you can run the following yum update command to install the appropriate packages:
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
Discover your Airport Extreme version
Broadcom is the manufacturer of the Airport Extreme wireless chip for Apple. The Broadcom chip in the Powerbook used to write this HOWTO is the BCM4306 802.11b/g (rev 03). Different versions of the firmware and driver might not be as straightforward. To discover the version of the Airport you have on your computer, under Linux run this command as root:
[root@localhost network-scripts]# lspci | grep -i broadcom [ENTER]

Here's the output I get on my laptop:
```
	0001:10:12.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g

	Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
	
```
If you have an earlier or later version, these instructions may or may not work for you. If you run into troubles, join the yellowdog-general mailing list or visit us on #yellowdog at freenode.irc.net. Someone there might be able to help you troubleshoot any problems you might have.
Extract the Airport Extreme firmware
The first step in getting your Airport Extreme working is to extract the necessary firmware files from your MacOS X drivers.
Note that these instructions were written for YDL v.6.1. Other versions of YDL may require different versions of fwcutter and the firmware.
1. Change to user root:
  su -
2. Download, extract and build b43-fwcutter software version 011, which will be used to extract the Broadcom drivers:
  wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2 [ENTER]
  tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2 [ENTER]
  cd b43-fwcutter-011 [ENTER]
  make [ENTER]
  
  The make command above should generate output similar to the following:
```
   cc -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -std=c99 -Wall -pedantic -D_BSD_\
SOURCE-DFWCUTTER_VERSION_=006   -c -o fwcutter.o fwcutter.c
   cc -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -std=c99 -Wall -pedantic -D_BSD_\
SOURCE-DFWCUTTER_VERSION_=006   -c -o md5.o md5.c
   cc -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -std=c99 -Wall -pedantic -D_BSD_\
SOURCE-DFWCUTTER_VERSION_=006 -o bcm43xx-fwcutter fwcutter.o md5.o
```
  ... and you should be left with a binary executeable called b43-fwcutter.
3. Type:
  cd .. [ENTER]
4. Download and use fwcutter software to extract the Broadcom proprietary driver:
  wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 [ENTER]
  tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 [ENTER]
  b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "/lib/firmware" broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o [ENTER]
5. The b43 within the /lib/firmware directory should contain files:
```
	[root@localhost ~]$ ll /lib/firmware/ [ENTER]
	a0g0bsinitvals4.fw
	a0g0bsinitvals5.fw
	a0g0bsinitvals9.fw
	a0g0initvals4.fw
	a0g0initvals5.fw
	a0g0initvals9.fw
	a0g1bsinitvals13.fw
	a0g1bsinitvals5.fw
	a0g1bsinitvals9.fw
	(more ...)
	
```
If wicd cannot find any local wireless networks, even after pressing "Refresh" once or twice, you may need to change the permissions on the b43 directory:
chmod 755 b43
Configure your wireless card under Linux using wicd.
Refer to Using Wicd Network Manager
You are on-line!