As I stated earlier, I just bought a new laptop and installed Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on it. All was working apart from the wireless connection. The Laptop comes with a Atheros wireless card. Ubuntu also comes installed with madwifi drivers for the card. So in theory things should just work, right ?

Well no. The version of the wireless card I have (I do not have the version to hand) does not work with the current ubuntu package of madWiFi drivers.

So this is a quick step by step tutorial on how I got things to work nicely :

• Get the g++ compiler : sudo apt-get install build-essential
• Download subversion : sudo apt-get install subversion
• Create directory to store the drivers and navigate to it.
• Download latest madwifi drivers using subversion : subversion svn checkout http://svn.madwifi.org/trunk madwifi
• Get the current Kernel you are running : uname -r
• Navigate to the correct lib directory : cd /lib/modules/$(uname -r) (use the output from the previous step to get the directory)
• Delete the net lib files : sudo rm -rf net
• Delete the madwifi files : sudo rm -rf madwifi
• Delete this folder if it exists : sudo rm -rf madwifi-ng
• Find the modules currently installed that you need to unload : lsmod | grep ath
• From this output above issue a rmmod command for all the modules : sudo rmmod modulename
• Go back to where you downloaded the new subversion drivers and run : sudo make and then sudo make install answer yes to remove the old module.
• Load all of the modules you have just unloaded using modprobe. These should be:
  sudo modprobe ath_pci
  sudo modprobe ath_rate_sample
  sudo modprobe wlan
  sudo modprobe ath_hal
• Check to see if modules have been loaded by typing dmesg and looking at the system log.
• Open up network gui in Ubuntu and enable the wifi card and set the sessid

The card should now be configured. However if you want a dock applet that informs you how much strength your wireless card has, I would suggest netapplet.

I hope this has helped someone. This took me about 2-3 hours to get working!

Hamza