Atheros AR5418 wireless devices, such as those included in the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo, will scan and detect networks but will not join them via DHCP with either MadWifi SVN or stable 0.9.3.3. This is related to http://madwifi.org/ticket/1543 and possibly https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=374881 . Sure enough, SVN > 2712 functions as expected on Ubuntu, as reported. It appears that some kernel tweak is required to make MadWifi functional on Fedora 8 for that chipset. This wasn't working a week ago; I don't know if there's been a kernel update correcting the issue since then and I don't know what version of the kernel package I was using when I encountered this problem. Fedora's bundled ath5k doesn't function with AR5418 yet.
Sorry, can't support madwifi in Fedora...
It's really not being able to support MadWifi? Wouldn't this kind of issue expose something a little deeper that may impair other projects? No one's asking you to distribute MadWifi, but fixing a kernel build error manifested in an incompatibly licensed program surely doesn't amount to supporting or endorsing the thing, right? I hate to patronize, but that response seems like a copout to me. I really do what I can to love Fedora, it has a lot of appeal to me ... but if this is how Red Hat chooses to conduct business, I won't bother with it anymore and I feel that that'd be a shame.
I'm not really sure what you expect me to do. Perhaps if you could point to a specific problem (or a specific patch that fixed a non-descript problem) we could evaluate it -- of course if there was a specific problem with the kernel it should be handled upstream anyway. That way it would filter down to Fedora, Ubuntu, and all the other distros. But, I digress... All I see is that there was a lot of talk about which SVN version of madwifi worked or didn't, then someone updated their Ubuntu kernel and things magically worked. It also seemed that the older madwifi versions were working with the older Ubuntu kernel, so that doesn't really identify which one really had a problem. Anyway, we do our best to support ath5k here. I hope their reverse engineering folks (also part of the overal madwifi team BTW) get to your device soon -- really, I do. In the meantime, I just don't have the bandwidth to chase down problems in madwifi. I'm sorry.
No problem. Thank you for the prompt and polite response. I'll see if I can find something more specific. : )