Jockey shows proprietary drivers being available for unsupported hardware, the wireless driver 'madwifi'

[Craig Cabrey]

Reason:
I wanted to try out the proprietary driver shown in jockey because the ath5k driver sometimes drops out and/or has slow network speeds. Also, NetworkManager sometimes refuses to connect to a WEP protected network which results in a reboot being necessary. I was hopeful that the madwifi driver would solve this. I think somebody else said that a newer version of madwifi/Atheros' HAL supports this hardware and that could be considered as a fix.

uname -a:
Linux cabreee 2.6.28-13-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 2 07:57:31 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

lspci | grep -i wireless:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

dmesg (after 'activating' the madwifi driver):
[ 4383.585323] ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 4383.589024] ath_hal: 0.9.18.0 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
[ 4383.619602] wlan: 0.9.4
[ 4383.643944] ath_pci: 0.9.4
[ 4383.644012] ath_pci 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 4383.644012] ath_pci 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 4383.692941] wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware revision not supported' (HAL status 13)
[ 4383.693003] ath_pci 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
[ 4434.688382] ATL1E 0000:01:00.0: irq 2300 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 4434.689440] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready