Atheros wifi0 device not being created by loaded ath_pci module

[Alan Pater]

I upgraded my laptop to feisty and lost the ath0 wireless device in the process. It has worked on every previous Ubuntu version for the last 18 months.

I found that the module is being loaded, but that it never creates the network devices. I believe this is madwifi-ng, it should be creating a wifi0 device and a ath0 device on top of that.

I installed the madwifi-tools package and attempted to create the ath0 device using

   root@nw8000laptop:~# wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta

That failed with the error "wlanconfig: ioctl: No such device" as the wifi0 device does not exist.

[Tobias Wolf (towolf)]

According to the madwifi bugtracker madwifi doesn´t even build on 2.6.20 currently:

http://madwifi.org/ticket/1048

[Alan Pater (alan-pater)]

I installed and booted kernel 2.6.19. There is still no ath0 device.

[Alan Pater (alan-pater)]

Oops, forgot to install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.19...

installing, rebooting ...

[Alan Pater (alan-pater)]

Works using kernel 2.6.19-7-generic.

[Alan Pater (alan-pater)]

Is Bug #76294 a duplicate of this?

[Tobias Wolf (towolf)]

Got svn updated today and they fixed the driver for 2.6.20.
Works good again.

Don’t know whether that helps.

[Kyle McMartin (kyle)]

Thanks for pointing out that madwifi is fixed upstream.