Comment 104 for bug 269253

I spent a lot of time with that problem after upgrade to lucid from karmic. When my Toshiba Satellite is powered on without ac charge this problem appears until reboot with battery disconnect. It renders laptop wlan unusable on battery power.

A list of my activities for the past week:

Trying to install latest atheros (ath5k) drivers from repos (linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic
) - failure (problem persists) (kernel 2.6.31 - 2.6.32)
Trying to build latest stable drivers from source (http://linuxwireless.org/) - failure (Tried all builds avaliable there at the moment in compat section) (problem persists)(kernel 2.6.31 - 2.6.32)
Trying to upgrade kernel (2.6.34 and 2.6.35rc) - failure (problem persists)
Trying to build driver on upgraded kernel - failure (problem persists)
Trying to install a fresh installation of lucid (formating partition with upgraded version and installing lucid from scratch) - failure (problem persists) (kernel 2.6.31 - 2.6.32)
Trying to force kernel downgrade to 2.6.31-rt via synaptic (as a last hope) - success! Problem disappeared at generic driver with no need to build anything more.

Conclusion - 100% 2.6.32 and higher kernel issue.