Libertas Thinfirmware HOWTO

This documents describes testing the softmac solution for the 88w8388 device included in the XO. We also refer to this project as Thinfirm. The objective of this project is to make possible to use an XO as a soft wireless access point.

Getting the firmware

# wget http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/libertas/thinfirm/lbtf_usb-5.132.1.p0.bin
# cp lbtf_usb-5.132.1.p0.bin /var/lib/firmware/lbtf_usb.bin

Getting and compiling the kernel

• Get the kernel:

git clone git://dev.laptop.org/users/javier/libertastf.git

Please note that this kernel is not appropriate for XOs. 2.6.26-rc1 was recently merged into olpc-2.6 master and we will add another tree or branch for XOs when it stabilizes a bit.

Enable mac80211 support and the following specific driver options:

CONFIG_LIBERTAS_THINFIRM=m
CONFIG_LIBERTAS_THINFIRM_USB=m

• Build and install.

If libertas driver (the former, fullmac one) is also compiled, both will compete for the device when it is discovered. In this case we recommend to blacklist one of the two modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (may vary among different distributions) so the other will be the one to load.

Switching to libertastf

If libertastf module has been blacklisted and thus libertas gets loaded, it is possible to easily test the libertastf driver:

# rmmod usb8xxx libertas
# modprobe libertastf_usb
# ifconfig wlan0 up
# iwconfig wlan0 essid whatever
# dhclient wlan0