Acer Aspire One (ZG5), Xubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 and Atheros WLAN

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.

HP G7061EO laptop, Atheros wireless card and the webcam on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 i386

If you have HP G7061EO laptop that has Atheros AR5007 (AR242x) wireless network adapter follow this procedure to make it work in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04

This is for i386 users. I’m repeating that because you might end up messing your system badly if you have 64bit installation.

- First go to System–>Administration–>Hardware Drivers and disable both selections having Atheros in their description

- Atheros Hardware Access Layer (Hal)
- Atheros driver..

- Then Reboot your system.

Preparing your system

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

- Then open the terminal from Applications–>Accessories–>Terminal and issue/copy the following commands

$ wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

$ tar xfz madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

$ cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

$ make

$ sudo make install

$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

$ sudo reboot

That’s it! Now your wireless connection should work.
Webcam works out of the box. To test it, give the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install cheese

Cheese program should appear after installation in “start” -> “graphics”.