Active Antenna Reprogramming

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This page is about reprogramming the Active Antenna, which is a standalone version of the XO laptop's wireless mesh network interface.

The Active Antenna performs two functions: it serves as a mesh access point for school servers, and it serves as a stand-alone mesh repeater. It was tension between these two functions that led to the pre-build and prototype builds to be manufactured with firmware which puts them into the mesh repeater mode before a server has had time to boot (Trac #4632). This page describes the setup for reprogramming the firmware, then either how to "fix" an Active Antenna for use with a server, or how to upgrade the firmware on a mesh repeater.

Setup

Prerequisites

The system used to reprogram the Antenna probably needs to be either Fedora 6 or Fedora 7.

It should NOT have drivers for the Active Antennas installed. If using an XS school server build, move the drivers out of the way:

mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/libertas /root

It will need to have the libusb development headers installed:

yum install libusb-devel

Obtaining the software

The software needed to program the firmware on the Active Antennas is available from [1] :

git clone git://git.infraqdead.org/libertas-flash

You will need to compile part of the software:

cd libertas-flash
make

Fixing an Active Antenna

In order to fix the early version of the Active Antennas, you will need to downgrade the installed Boot2 code in the Antenna.

Obtaining the Firmware

Programming the Antenna

Upgrading a Mesh Repeater

Obtaining the Firmware

Other