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I recently got a spanking new Compaq Presario c700 ( Model : c770TU ) with Atheros ar242x PCI Express wlan card from the new company I just moved to. This laptop is not without issues. It was designed for windows Vista and most supporting drivers are for Vista however it ships with XP. This was anyway irrelevant for me as I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on it. Most of the devices got auto configured but there are still a few which need to be setup. One of these is the WIFI. This Laptop has a Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter. While it is detected in the initial installation of ubuntu it does not work by default AFAIK.
sudo apt-get update
The following instructions deal with installing setting AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter on Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, but this should also work on all the previous releases of Ubuntu. These instructions presume that you already have internet connection setup to work on ubuntu and that you have already installed Ubuntu. Enter the following command on the Terminal window(opened by going to (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) to install subversion version control system used to get drivers from the online repository.
sudo apt-get install subversion
Next we will need to install the essentials needed to compile the madwifi packages
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Lets Install Wireless tools while we are at it. Google for info on wireless tools.
sudo apt-get install wireless-tools
cd to your home directory or any other directory where you want to extract the packages.
cd /home/
Diable current ath_ modules sudo modprobe -r ath_pci sudo modprobe -r ath_hal
At this point you have most of it setup. Now we need to check-out(retrieve) the madwifi drivers from the repository. sudo svn co https://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/branches/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6
Last step should have a directory by name of 'madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6' in your home directory.
Go to System–>Administration–>Hardware Drivers” and disable by un-ticking the following option Atheros Hardware Access Layer (Hal) Then Reboot your system. Open a new terminal window once the system reboots. change directory to the location where you checked out madwifi drivers. cd /home/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/
Run the following commands one by one.sudo make sudo make install  sudo modprobe ath_pci sudo reboot
make sure there were no errors reported after running 'make' or 'make install'. Now Reboot the system once more. your WiFi should work now. :) |
