How To Get Atheros AR242x To Work on 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

Posted by Berry van der Linden in AR242x, Internet, Kubuntu, Terminal on Nov 7th, 2008 | 524 comments

Updates

**02-24-2009** Instructions for fix after update to kernel 2.6.27-11-generic below.  This how to uses compat-wireless-2009-02-24.tar.bz2. It was tested on (K)Ubuntu 8.10 KDE 4.1.2. Kernel version 2.6.27-7-generic & 2.6.27-9-generic

For instructions on getting the AR242x to work on 8.04 click here.

Introduction

You could see this as part 3 in the series: How To Get Atheros AR242x Wireless To Work
It’s with disappointment that I have to report the following:

I started with a fresh install of Kubuntu 8.10, the reason for this is simple I wanted to make sure that nobody could say “you should have done a clean install”. On a clean install out of the box the AR242x doesn’t work.

What I Tried First

So I started to search for solutions. There a several solutions out there here is a quick list:

  • Install linux-backports-modules-intrepid. This works but you would have to reload the driver every time you log on.
  • Blacklist ath_hal and ath_pci. This didn’t work for me. The idea behind this is that the madwifi module will not load and instead ath5k is used.
  • Download and install the new wireless driver which uses the newest version of ath5k.

    • The last option worked the best for me so that is what I’ll go with for this how to. Let me clarify that ath_hal, ath5k and ath9k are all developed by madwifi so props to them for doing such a great job of developing the drivers that make wireless for the AR242x work under Linux.

    This is a preview of How To Get Atheros AR242x To Work on 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. Read the full post (1048 words, estimated 4:12 mins reading time)