Hacking Zeroshell to work with a TL-WN822N wifi card

[paradoxbound]

Until recently I was running a very kludgy home made firewall based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. However it was very ugly and not very user friendly. I have moved my main firewall over to Zeroshell after it won a beauty contest with other dedicated firewall distros and in general I am very happy. The only problem is my wfi card the TL-WN822N of the subject line which is a USB device. I ran it quite happly using a bridge between wlan0 and eth0 and used hostapd to handle the SSID and other configuration parameters.

Poking around in the shell I can see Zeroshell supports the Atheros ath9K_htc chipset on which my card is based it is however it is missing the htc_7010.fw[1] required for USB based devices. This firware is installed by default for Ubuntu 12.04

root@zeroshell root> dmesg | grep -i ath
[ 3.004920] usb 5-4: Manufacturer: ATHEROS
[ 20.393420] ath9k_htc 5-4:1.0: usb_probe_interface
[ 20.393431] ath9k_htc 5-4:1.0: usb_probe_interface – got id
[ 20.393446] usb 5-4: ath9k_htc: Firmware htc_7010.fw requested
[ 20.394545] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath9k_htc
[ 20.401779] usb 5-4: ath9k_htc: Failed to get firmware htc_7010.fw
[ 20.401958] usb 5-4: ath9k_htc: USB layer deinitialized

Am I right in thinking that once I get the firmware blob in there the wlan interface should automagically appear?

Could people advise of the easiest way to get the htc_7010.fw into Zeroshell or do I have to completely rebuild Zeroshell and the iso9660 file system?

If I have to rebuild could people kindly point me to best practice docs and posts?

[1] http://wireless.kernel.org/download/htc_fw/1.3/

Regards Jim

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