Comment 6 for bug 289014

I's like to agree with Stuart that ath5k was stable for me on my Asus 900 (restored connections after suspend better than my Vista machine). I also agree that knowing how to use backports is another barrier to entry.

IMHO the next 12 months is a golden opportunity for Ubuntu to gain significant market share in the netbook space. Even though Microsoft is struggling there don't think they will give up without a fight. I don't think Ubuntu should wait another 6 months to support this chip set out-of-box.

That said, and with thanks to all those providing help to me in past bugs and forums, here are the steps it took for me to get the backports installed (and my wireless working):

1) System->admin->"Software Sources"
2) On "Updates" tab check "Unsupported updates (intrepid-backports)"
3) When prompted click "Reload" to update the indexes
4) System->admin->"Synaptic..."
5) Find and mark for installation "linux-backports-modules-intrepid"
6) Click "Apply"
7) optionally from Terminal type "modprobe -l | grep ath5k" and you should see the location of the driver displayed to confirm it is there.
8) Reboot and your wireless should be working again.

Note: I've seen other bugs say you must add the line "blacklist ath_pci" to a file in /etc/modprobe.d, but that doesn't seem to be required anymore (I think it was for the -6 kernel). Also I'm sure there is a way to get the driver loaded from terminal without a reboot, but I'll have to defer to more experienced users to outline those steps.