Software Free

Atlast I got wireless working in my Acer Aspire 5050’s Atheros 5006 under the newly released Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron with the madwifi drivers. (BTW the upgrade to 8.04 from 7.10 screwed up my X server and I reinstalled from scratch). Previously I was using the ndiswrapper drivers and they would only work the first 5 minutes. Anyway here is a tutorial on how to get WiFi working if you have one of the Atheros cards.

1. First get the patched madwifi drivers from the site and extract them to some place (maybe your desktop)
2. You need to compile these drivers, so you must sudo apt-get install build-essential.
3. Then cd into that directory which you extracted recently and do a make, sudo make install
4. Then add the following two lines to this file /etc/modules
   ath_pci
   wlan_scan_sta
5. Then make sure that you disabled Atheros from System > Administration > Hardware Drivers (also called Restricted drivers management). If you don’t disable this, the modules which you added in the previous lines wont be loaded.
6. Then restart your system to find a new device named ath0 (when you ifconfig)

PS: I know it has been almost 5 months since I posted here. I am giving the (s/l)ame reason here that I was busy. I haven’t been giving much attention to this blog. If you can give some ideas or suggestions on better managing my time it would really help.