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.