Short info how to get the Wireless card working in Xubuntu.
EDIT:Make sure you have build-essential installed! (Pointed out by friendly reader, thank you very much! My mistake that this was forgotten from the original post! Sorry for the possible trouble!)
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
Get the latest madwifi pack http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz and save it to your home folder for example.
Disable current Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) and Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless lan cards from Applications – System – Hardware Drivers and then reboot as requested
Make sure that ath_hal module is not loaded in the future:
$ sudo mcedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common
Add ath_hal between the quotation marks, for example DISABLED_MODULES=”ath_hal”
Unpack the downloaded tar.gz
$ tar xzvf madwifi-hal-yaddayadda.tar.gz
Cd into the new folder scripts under the new unpacked madwifi folder
Execute madwifi-unload and find-madwifi-modules.sh scripts
$ sudo ./madwifi-unload
$ sudo ./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)
Drop one level back,
$ cd ..
and just to be sure, execute make clean to get rid of old crap
$ make clean
Then we check just to be sure that the Hardware Drivers does not show any drivers for Atheros wlan or HAL. If the window is clean, proceed to building the modules.
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci
Then, check that you have ath0 and wifi0 network adapters created, ath0 should be the first, wifi0 last. You might need to scroll back a bit
$ ifconfig
Now you should be able to see AP’s via panel’s network applet. You can also scan for wlan’s with command
$ sudo wlanconfig ath0 list scan
That’s it, happy networking! 
When you get updates/upgrades that change kernel in any way, your wireless card drivers won’t work anymore. Just do the whole thing all over again and you’re wireless again.
EDIT: If the driver is not loaded automatically, you can add ath_pci to /etc/modules
Here’s the commands:
$ sudo mcedit /etc/modules
add ath_pci into a new LAST line of the document, save the document and reboot.
If you don’t want to reboot right away, you can type
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci
This loads the module(driver) and you should have wlan up and running then. Just remember when you reboot the next time that you added the module to “loaded at startup” configuration.
17.08.2008 at 9:35 |
[...] logitechwireless: Disable current Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) and Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless lan cards from Applications – System – Hardware Drivers and then reboot as requested. Make sure that ath_hal module is not loaded in the future: … [...]
7.12.2008 at 22:03 |
Brilliant!
23.08.2008 at 15:00 |
Thanks =)
This helped me alot.
But my installation of Hardy didn’t include build-essential, så make didn’t work at first.
To install build-essential:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
24.08.2008 at 1:17 |
Hardy,
Thanks for the info!
Edited the post to include the build-essential reminder/installation.
4.09.2008 at 2:24 |
Wireless was working fine, until something related to modules was upgraded by Ubuntu. Now I can’t get madwifi to work anymore; ath_hal is loaded all the time, DISABLED_MODULES=”ath_hal” doesn’t seem to have any effect.
4.09.2008 at 11:23 |
Hi Quaka,
If you installed any kernel related updates, you need to recompile the driver.
Open Hardware Drivers tool from system management and untick the atheros driver (and hal if it’s ticked), then reboot.
When the system is up again, go to the folder where the driver was extracted and:
$ make clean
$ make
$ sudo make install
Reboot or:
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci
to load the driver/module.
Hope this helps! If not, shout out again?
1.10.2008 at 16:39 |
It is not working under Xubuntu…
Is ther another way to get the wifi running???
2.10.2008 at 9:15 |
Hans,
“sudo modprobe ath_pci” and “dmesg | tail” in terminal and see if there’s error messages about the card/module.
If there’s clear error messages, try the whole configuration all over again.
9.11.2008 at 1:56 |
How do I find the MAC address? I need to connect to a protected WiFi access point, and need get teh MAC to enable that access.
I am out of box with this thing, so right now I am simply trying to get it to work with my access point.
Any ideas?
9.11.2008 at 23:22 |
Shawn,
Open terminal and type “ifconfig”
From there you should be able to see MAC address (or HWaddr), it looks like 00:12:34:ab:cd:ef
Usually it is also in a sticker on the bottom of the computer.
Hope this helps!
23.11.2008 at 2:40 |
Thank you so much, I was able to do this without knowing anything about linux at all – all I knew was a very little bit of unix…
Thank you thank you thank you!
24.11.2008 at 9:54 |
erstwhile,
Nice to hear!
7.12.2008 at 21:52 |
Most grateful – worked on my HP dv6820ea
7.12.2008 at 22:39 |
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