Karmic: Wlan Atheros AR928X ath9k: no fix works

[scottro]

For what it's worth, the backports didn't work for me. What did work was using the wireless-compat drivers.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

It's supposed to be better with the 2.6.32 kernel--with Fedora, using such a kernel, it seemed slightly better, but only slightly.

Using iperf, which, I freely admit, can miss various other factors.

With Fedora and 2.6.32 kernel, I get about 21 MB/s. With ArchLinux, though, I get about 40.

With Ubuntu, with or without backports, I was getting about 1MB or less. (That's not a typo, just one megabyte.)

Installing the compat-wireless drivers puts it up to around 40.

Apparently, this is a kernel, rather than distribution, issue, that started around the 2.6.29 or 2.6.30 kernel.

It's the sort of thing that will seriously hurt Linux on netbooks, though one assumes that at least with preinstalled Linux netbooks, they test them before shipping.

[omniuni]

Just finished installing KUbuntu Karmic on an Acer laptop, and I noticed quickly that the wireless kept dropping, and for the most part, would not reconnect. I installed the packages mentioned earlier, and indeed, it seems to have worked! Signal strength is full, so far it has not disconnected, and the speed seems to be pretty stable.

Definitely, a good fix, and an easy one! Thanks!

[psymole]

Hi, I'm having similar issues and i have a coupel of doubts

Originally Posted by Prosis View Post
Someone named sebz_ posted a solution that worked fine!

You check if ath9k (or ath5k) is loaded in /etc/modules

echo ath9k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then you install

linux-backports-modules-karmic and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic (and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic-pae if you can but I didn't need it)

Reboot and all should be fine!

When says

I commented the ath_pci blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf.

what exactly was commented.

And in

You check if ath9k (or ath5k) is loaded in /etc/modules

echo ath9k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

It's that command intended to ad ath5k or 9k to the modules files.

Thx,

[Taemojitsu]

ty for this, worked for me (several weeks ago). The listed wireless driver was ath9k before and after, but performance is much improved after this fix. Was trying to check if the text file edits were necessary, but tested by checking the driver instead of by performance and didn't know how to check for a version number for the driver, but as in the previous post my listed signal went up by about 30% and haven't seen the buffer overflow problems was getting before. At most it might have a few seconds of bad ping before going back to normal, whereas with the default Karmic driver would have to reselect the wireless network or even restart my laptop.

[freetolio]

Someone named sebz_ posted a solution that worked fine!

I commented the ath_pci blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf.

You check if ath9k (or ath5k) is loaded in /etc/modules

echo ath9k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then you install

linux-backports-modules-karmic and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic (and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic-pae if you can but I didn't need it)

Reboot and all should be fine!

Thanks a bunch. This worked like a charm on the AR928X in my Gateway NV5214u. This is so much easier than all the crap I used to have to go through with the Broadcom chip I had in another laptop.

I previously had all sorts of intermittent connection instabilities (in addition to poor reception) that were worst when downloading lots of packages. After the fix, I installed Nexuiz to have the install itself serve as a torture test due to its size, and it worked great. I also did a 7+GB file transfer locally (through an 802.11n router to a wired file server) and the transfer sustained a peak 7.5MB/sec (download) with nothing else going on on.

[cordy74]

I have tried all of the suggestions in this post and many others and I am at a loss. I have an Acer Aspire One D150 netbook which is using the Atheros AR5001 wireless card. At first I could connect to my home network without any problem but my connection speeds were about 10% of what my other laptop is seeing. Anybody have any suggestions on what to do next? My internet is blazing fast when I hard wire into my router. It seems as if Ubuntu just isn't talking to my wifi card like it should.

[coffeecat]

This thread is about the Atheros AR928X chipset using the ath9k driver in Karmic. You have a machine with a different chipset which uses a different driver in a different version of Ubuntu (Hardy - if your personal details are correct).

Anybody have any suggestions on what to do next?

Yes - do a forum search for threads relevant to your situation. Or, have a look at this link:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

There are links through to specific intstructions for the various current versions of Ubuntu near the top of that page.

[Lucien.Malavard]

Someone named sebz_ posted a solution that worked fine!

I commented the ath_pci blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf.

You check if ath9k (or ath5k) is loaded in /etc/modules

echo ath9k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Then you install

linux-backports-modules-karmic and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic (and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic-pae if you can but I didn't need it)

Reboot and all should be fine!

Hi, sorry if I'm opening a closed thread. I recently installed Karmic 9.10 netbook remix on a Sony Vaio VPCW126AG (10" netbook) and replaced the Network Manager with WICD. WICD keeps dropping out of WPA2 wireless connections, and worse still, it fails to detect any wireless networks, after the machine wakes up from suspend mode suspend.

I think this machine has an Atheros wireless chipset judging from Sony's website on the model. Does anyone know if the fix above works for this model here?

Also what needs to be done at Prosis' step (quoted below), after checking if ath9k or ath5k?

You check if ath9k (or ath5k) is loaded in /etc/modules

echo ath9k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Thanks for your time!

[Malakai]

For what it's worth, the backports didn't work for me. What did work was using the wireless-compat drivers.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download

It's supposed to be better with the 2.6.32 kernel--with Fedora, using such a kernel, it seemed slightly better, but only slightly.

Using iperf, which, I freely admit, can miss various other factors.

With Fedora and 2.6.32 kernel, I get about 21 MB/s. With ArchLinux, though, I get about 40.

With Ubuntu, with or without backports, I was getting about 1MB or less. (That's not a typo, just one megabyte.)

Installing the compat-wireless drivers puts it up to around 40.

Apparently, this is a kernel, rather than distribution, issue, that started around the 2.6.29 or 2.6.30 kernel.

It's the sort of thing that will seriously hurt Linux on netbooks, though one assumes that at least with preinstalled Linux netbooks, they test them before shipping.

Hello everyone! I just wanted to give a shout out to my good and dear friend scottro here! I have been wanting to use Ubuntu full time or as much as possible for a long time on my beloved little Asus 1000he, using the Atheros AR928X. But the wireless would sporadically disconnect, and xfer speeds/signal strength were extremely poor compared to windows 7.

Nothing I tried worked, I could use the netbook online, but any kind of download or xfer speeds were horrible. After following this post to compat-wireless, and following the instructions on their website to unpack and install the drivers, my wireless on ubuntu is finally working respectively.

I use an ftp server on my main box so I can access all my files both on the netbook at my house over my home wireless G network (WRT54GL w/Tomato OS), and wherever I am around town while connected to the net.

Well even 10 feet away from the wireless router at home, I was getting under 100kb/sec transfer speeds from my main PC to my 1000he. Now with my netbook in its normal location (about 30ft through 3-4 walls on the other side of my house) with the new compat drivers, I am getting 2-2.5MB/sec xfer speeds.

I used the newest highest version number of compat drivers, from the stable page, and followed the install instructions exactly, note I needed to install patch and patchutils hehe, gentoo base installed packages, or lack thereof. is funny!

Also my bluetooth mouse which worked perfectly in windows 7 (syba connectland bluetooth mouse, 15 dollars at newegg) was constantly disconnecting. It seems that the compat drivers also replaced the stock bluetooth drivers, cuz now my bluetooth mouse is working absolutely perfectly as well.

Again thank you again scottro. I do not actually know you, as I am very new to Ubuntu (8+ year Gentoo user) and its forums; but I was probably less than a day from wiping out my Ubuntu partition and rewriting the MBR on my main hard drive to remove GRUB and thus ubuntu forever. Well at least until eeebuntu 4.0 came out.

Now both of my major complaints about Ubuntu on my 1000he, bluetooth issues and extremely poor wireless performance, have both been solved. And it was quite simple to do, and required less than an hour. I am getting more and more comfortable with Ubuntu, and I can continue to use it and learn more about it, now that my mouse and wireless works properly.

Check.. still downloading a tv series from my main pc (ST TNG season 4... yes I am a geek hehe) currently at 2.3mb/sec. I can get up to (and even a hair over on rare occasions) 3mb/sec with flashfxp or filezilla on windows 7, but this is close enough and more than fast enough for normal internet downloads and file xfers over my wireless g network. Before web pages loaded annoyingly slowly, regular internet downloads were going at sub-1kb/sec (yar dont you hate when a file is downloading at like 254 bytes per second lol!). Now all is fine and perfectly usable.

Thanks again scottro and all the compat-wireless coders/bug testers/ect! Very very nice drivers, hope over time they eventually overtake windows 7. There is a lot to love about Linux nowadays, god its so much nicer looking than it was when I started with Linux many years ago. I was sad that the ever popular Ubuntu just would not work right with the 1000HE when I frequently see that it is supposed to be 1000% compatible with Ubuntu 9.10.


Now the next, and one of the last, things I need to get working right is soe kind of eee power management software. I have tried eee-control and eee-acpi-utilities or whatever, and neither will install or function right.

Gnome itself has the little cpu monitor taskbar applet that allows adjustment of the cpu speed, which is nice and will tide me over till now, but I would prefer a power management interface ala Eeebuntu had. Eeebuntu 3 however had other problems that forced me to not be able to use it on this box. I use this netbook all day for work and i could not have it unstable or breaking on update ala Eeebuntu3 was doing.

Thanks!! Im so happy now, I missed the command line and real package management after using Win7 almost exclusively on all my boxes since the RTM first hit the scene

[2hot6ft2]

Thanks Prosis and a thanks to sebz_ the one you got the info from.

I didn't even get enough signal before where I am right now for the internal card to connect. Now it connects and has 47% signal. Much better.

I just did blacklisting the ath_pci blacklist in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf and installed the 2 backports linux-backports-modules-karmic and linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic.

For those that aren't sure how to do this. Open a terminal
Applications > Accessories > Terminal
and put in

gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ath_pci.conf

Hit Enter
Type in your password and hit Enter
When it opens add "# " before ath_pci blacklist
so it looks like this

# ath_pci blacklist

Hit Save and close it
Then in the terminal which will still be open put in:

sudo apt-get update

Hit Enter
After it finishes then use:

sudo apt-get install backports linux-backports-modules-karmic linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic

When it finishes you can close the terminal and reboot.

My laptop that I did it on.
HPG60-125NR
Atheros AR5009 (with AR928X)