Comment 6 for bug 286861

    I recently reinstalled Intrepid using the ISO image available on ubuntu.com. After installation, I rebooted. The Atheros card was not operational. However, under System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers, Ubuntu shows "Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards" as being activated.

    My next step was to update the system (using my wired LAN, of course). The updates installed flawlessly, and I rebooted. The Atheros card was still not operational. Output of 'iwconfig', 'lspci -vvnn', and 'lshw -C net' match my original posting to this bug track, but dmesg no longer makes any reference to ath5k (time indexes 67.043974 - 67.054151).

    I then changed the options in the Software Sources section to allow Pre-release Updates (intrepid-proposed) and allowed the system to update. Once again, I rebooted the system after the updates installed. The Atheros card still did not work.

At this time, I ran 'lsmod | grep ath' and got:
ath_pci 99096 0
wlan 211952 1 ath_pci
ath_hal 198864 1 ath_pci

    The only thing I've found that gets the card working is compiling the drivers from "madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3861-20080903.tar.gz". I follow the instructions in the README (run a couple scripts to remove the current "inactive" wireless driver, make, make install), and the card works until the next kernel update is released. Then I have to compile and install the drivers again. The frustrating part isn't that it doesn't work "out of the box," but simply that I have to fix the box every time there's a kernel update.