Wifi working again with ath5k!

Earlier this year, I bought an Acer Aspire 4315 laptop. It comes with an Atheros AR5BXB63, just like the Asus Eeepc. Initially, it came with Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10). It’s wireless was set up fine, using ndiswrapper. Upgrading to Hardy, I then lost wifi again. There was a method then, using madwifi drivers with a proprietary Atheros Hardware Adress Layer. That worked great for a time if you followed certain instructions. Then, unfortunately, that package dissapeared as the Madwifi team moved away from HAL, and focused on ath5k and ath9k. For some reason or another I reinstalled Ubuntu, losing the old setup. So, for about three months, I have resigned myself to having no wifi connection. It’s fine if you’ve just always had a cable connection.

Now, I’m pleased to report that I have been successful in installing ath5k drivers, something that failed before. The drivers are available from here. The best part of this is that the drivers are open source, so can be bundled by default.  Who knows, maybe someday we’ll have wifi working out of the box on all Linux distributions.  By the way, packet injection does not work, but Backtrack has always worked fine for me. Try not to get caught.

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