The details of the installation of the ATM driver can be found in the installation manual of the driver distribution [WA96]. In this section, a summary of the operations and some personal experience will be given.
The ATM code from the distribution must be integrated into the kernel. The procedure is described in the USAGE file in the Linux-ATM distribution. When a kernel has been configured and compiled for the installed hardware and usage requirements, the system can be started with ATM support.
Simple ATM transmissions can be done using the aread and awrite commands to send data over a PVC using an [InterfaceNumber.]VPI.VCI combination. The interface number is optional, the default value is zero.
For the explanation of further configuration of the Linux-ATM system,
the the following configuration is used: Two Linux-ATM hosts (X and Y)
connected to an ATM switch, see Figure 
.
Figure: Example ATM network of two hosts and an ATM switch
To enable signalling, the signalling daemon must be started on the machine using the command ``atmsigd -b''. Now the ATM driver can interact with the signalling entity in the ATM switch. To automatically configure the ATM address, the ILMI daemon must be started by the command ``ilmid -b''.
To show the configured ATM address, the command ``atmaddr -n'' shows the 40 digit hexadecimal number on the screen.
The following commands must be entered on the hosts to install
Classical IP and ARP over ATM in the Linux-ATM system. This is for the
example network shown in Figure .
On host X:
``atmarpd -b'' The ATMARP daemon is
started on host X to enable CLIP support.
``ifconfig `atmarp
-c` 10.0.0.1 up'' Now the atm interface (the identifier for the
interface is generated by the ``atmarp -c'' command) is attached
to an IP number, in this case 10.0.0.1.
``route add -net 10.0.0.0'' The IP entity must know that it can
reach network 10.0.0.0 directly.
On host Y:
``atmarpd -b'' See the same command on host X
``ifconfig `atmarp -c` 10.0.0.2 up'' Host Y's atm interface is
configured with IP number 10.0.0.2.
``route add -net 10.0.0.0'' See the same command on host X
Now one host must be configured to act as an ATMARP server for the
subnet 10.0.0.0. (If there is no ATMARP server already available for that
network). We assume that just the two hosts X and Y are connected to the
switch and nothing else. Therefore, one of the two hosts must be ATMARP
server for the other. The default operation of atmarpd is to
act as ATMARP server, so we only need to tell host X that host Y is the
ATMARP server and that it is a client itself. This is done using the command on
host X: ``atmarp -s 10.0.0.0 <ATM(Y)> arpsrv''
Now both hosts are fully configured to act as IP nodes on the subnet 10.0.0.0 over the ATM network. Of course, only unicast transmissions are possible. It should now be possible to use telnet or ftp to contact host Y from host X using IP address 10.0.0.2 using the command: ``telnet 10.0.0.2''.
Once configured, the TCP/IP services offered by the CLIP service are indistinguishable from the ``normal'' Ethernet/IP interface to the user. Indistinguishable apart from the lack of IP multicast support.