I don't have a laptop with an Atheros card, so I'm not familiar with this issue, but I agree that it's something that should be worked out.
I wanted to point out to you, however, that a better way to get your card working would to be use the native madwifi drivers. The version of madwifi that ships with Ubuntu 8.04 is too old to support Atheros 5007, but if you compile a more recent version of madwifi from source, your card should work (maybe even with the LED). You can install newer madwifi very easily by using the script from
this thread. Run the script, reboot, and your card should work (make sure that ath_pci is not on the blacklist, of course).
ndiswrapper would probably also work, although I seem to recall people having issues with ar5007 and ndiswrapper on 64-bit Linux. They may have been resolved by now, however, or I may be thinking of something else. Either way, I highly recommend trying madwifi first.
Also, in Ubuntu 8.10, your card should have support out-of-the-box, so none of this would be an issue.
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