W500 Ubuntu 8.10 Atheros Wireless Working

[sixstyle]

Here are the steps that I used to get my atheros based wireless working.

I am basically a linux novice so I dont really know what I am doing. However this did work for me and it was easier than all this ndiswrapper business.

MUCH EASIER!


Make sure your are fully updated first of all.

1. Navigate to the Linux Wireless website http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download

2. Read this stuff

3. Go ahead and download the tarball from step 5 (Directly Downloading the Tarball)

4. Building and installing

Extract:

Extract the content of the package: (Note match your filename mine is used as a sample)

tar jxvf compat-wireless-2008-12-29.tar.bz2

Build:

Build the latest Linux wireless subsystem: (Note match your filename mine is used as a sample)

cd compat-wireless-2008-12-29
make

Install:

We use the updates/ directory so your distribution's drivers are left intact.

sudo make install

Unload:

Since you might be replacing your old mac80211 drivers you should first try to unload all existing mac80211 and related drivers. Note also that broadcom, zydas, and atheros devices have old legacy drivers which you need to be sure are removed first. We provide a mechanism to unload all old and legacy drivers first so you should run to be sure:

sudo make unload

Load:

If you know what module you need you can simply load the module using modprobe. If you simply are not sure you can use:

sudo make load

Note that this will run make unload first, just in case you forgot. This unloads your old wireless subsystem drivers and loads the new shiny ones. For example if ipw3945 and its proprietary daemon are found it'll be stopped and the module unloaded and then iwl3945 will be loaded. If you are simply upgrading a mac80211 driver this will unload the old one and the old mac80211 drivers and load the new ones.

5. Now we have wireless working, but its loading all the modules. They arent going to load on startup either. So we have to load OUR module at startup.

echo ath5k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Now at reboot your wirless should be working.

I got this information from these sources.

http://madberry.org/2008/11/how-to-get- ... epid-ibex/

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download