I’ve heard that most people don’t have a problem with this, but I did. I have an AR5212 in my Thinkpad, and while ath5k works, it drops connections randomly, especially when the connection strength isn’t great to begin with.

This began to get very frustrating, so I slogged through a forum thread at FedoraForum.org. Despite being called lazy on multiple occasions (because someone is temperamental and I tend to overlook useful information if it’s not pointed out as being critical), I managed to get madwifi installed.

Madwifi must be recompiled every time the kernel updates. This is fine, as I tend to re-try ath5k each time the kernel updates as it seems to work better (better signal strength and comes back more reliably after I suspend the computer) besides the connection thing.

Anyhow, if you are having the same problem as me, this is the important stuff from the thread:

  1. Download THIS SNAPSHOT OF MADWIFI because the others do not compile in F11.
  2. As root,  yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ make kernel-devel
  3. Untar the snapshot, compile it with “make” and install it with “make install” as root.
  4. As root, do “rmmod ath5k && modprobe ath_pci” to enable madwifi. NetworkManager will disconnect and reconnect shortly.
  5. If you want to keep this, add “blacklist ath5k” to the end of  /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf (again, as root)
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