Active Antenna Reprogramming
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.