atheros/8.10 problems

[brodiesel]

hello all

i did a soft upgrade from hardy to intrepid, and low and behold, my wireless stopped working. it would appear that i am missing the driver, even though it worked on hardy and continues to work "out of the box" with the hardy live disc. the device manager and hardware testing are confirming the existence of the Atheros 802.11 WLAN but the hardware drivers section does not list that driver, which is easily found by the hardy live disc.

so whats the deal? more importantly, how can i install or activate this driver without having to download it (since it obviously exists somewhere on my computer)? Ive tried looking for some command line tools to help with this, but didnt get far...

[Petrock6]

Try a Madwifi driver.

[brodiesel]

again, i'm not sure how i should go about doing that without having an internet connection in intrepid.

to make this scenario more annoying, i am currently running off a live disc of intrepid where the wireless works perfectly. can someone explain to me why the version i downloaded a few short days ago does not have the "Support for Atheros 802.11 Wireless LAN Cards" driver that the live disc has? And can someone also explain to me how I can use this functioning and online version of Interepid to dowload an appropriate driver to somewhere I can access from the installed Intrepid?

sorry for the tone, its been a long day... and it sometimes dawns on me that im not getting any better with computers...

[yamagami]

I have the same problem on a thinkpad t61p.
Infact, I've had this in hardy as well, but managed to overcome it by installing the latest madwifi and wpa_supplicant off svn every time i upgraded a kernel. In interpid i'm not so lucky.
at this moment the drivers (either madwifi ath_pci or ath5k) load fine, but the card cannot connect to any wifi network. it keeps asking me for the passphrase for either wpa or wep. after all my attemps it can now no longer show any network in network manager. I have to connect ot an 'invisible' one selecting one of my previous connections which are still rememebered.
I'm tearing out my hairs here. literally.

[brodiesel]

yeah, I hear you. i've had this problem for five days now with no resloution. i just dont understand why the live disc would work when the install doesnt.
as far as installing the madwifi driver, is that something you did from the live disc? where's a good place to save that so that intrepid can find it when i boot that up?

[nothingspecial]

Download the latest madwifi snapshot.

wget http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3861-20080903.tar.gz

Unzip it

tar -xvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3861-20080903.tar.gz

navigate to the extracted file

cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3861-20080903

If you`ve not got the tools necessary for compiling get them

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Then compile it

sudo make

sudo make install

load the module/driver

sudo modprobe ath_pci

make it load every time you boot

gksudo gedit /etc/modules

then copy and paste this to the bottom of that file

ath_pci

save
exit
reboot

[brodiesel]

thanks. i am going to try this, but first a couple noob questions:

how do i specify a directory on my hd to save it to? once i do that, how do i activate that driver from within the installed version?

[brodiesel]

uhoh.

failure:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
--2008-11-06 21:52:30--  http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
Resolving snapshots.madwifi.org... 217.24.1.134
Connecting to snapshots.madwifi.org|217.24.1.134|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://snapshots.madwifi-project.orgmadwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz [following]
--2008-11-06 21:52:31--  http://snapshots.madwifi-project.orgmadwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz/
Resolving snapshots.madwifi-project.orgmadwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address `snapshots.madwifi-project.orgmadwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz'
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[eks]

to make this scenario more annoying, i am currently running off a live disc of intrepid where the wireless works perfectly. can someone explain to me why the version i downloaded a few short days ago does not have the "Support for Atheros 802.11 Wireless LAN Cards" driver that the live disc has? And can someone also explain to me how I can use this functioning and online version of Interepid to dowload an appropriate driver to somewhere I can access from the installed Intrepid?

I don't know, but someone asked exactly this same question here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/288148

I suggest you also post a complaint, your point is interesting and strongly valid.

And anyway, you can plug an ethernet cable to your laptop, somehow, and do the information available on the wiki:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...Driver/Atheros

So far, the built-in solution using the linux-backports-modules, worked for a fair amount of people. But if you installed other driver manually first you will need to blacklist the others and make sure ath5k is not blacklisted. And if you have problem connecting to a WEP network, see the post bellow.

[eks]

I have the same problem on a thinkpad t61p.
Infact, I've had this in hardy as well, but managed to overcome it by installing the latest madwifi and wpa_supplicant off svn every time i upgraded a kernel. In interpid i'm not so lucky.
at this moment the drivers (either madwifi ath_pci or ath5k) load fine, but the card cannot connect to any wifi network. it keeps asking me for the passphrase for either wpa or wep. after all my attemps it can now no longer show any network in network manager.

Try setting the wpa supplicant to wext. It worked for me.