Linux Mint Forums • How To: Get your atheros wifi working in Mint 6 x64

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How To: Get your atheros wifi working in Mint 6 x64

Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 11:54 am

by Guest

I think just about everyone has gone through their own personal frustrations with getting the atheros drivers to work correctly at one time or another. I am a huge mint fan, so when I saw the x64 version I had to install it and give it a whirl. Out of the box everything worked, other than my atheros wireless. I am on a Compaq F756NR laptop, this has the atheros 5006 wireless chipset.

So for my disclaimer, this works for Atheros chipset identified as the 242x..

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lspci |grep Atheros

If you dont see something like this, I cannot promise this will work for you.

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03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

I have read and read and read every work around and tutorial out there for ubuntu x64 and the atheros wifi.
This is my combination of a few different tuts and getting the ath5k up and running in x64.

So lets get started...

Remove restricted modules

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sudo update-rc.d -f linux-restricted-modules-common remove

We are going to need the build essentials (if you dont already have them)

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sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install build-essential

Change dir to desktop

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cd ~/Desktop

Get the latest wireless driver from kernel.org

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wget http://wireless.kernel.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-2.6.tar.bz2

Untar it

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tar xvf compat*.tar.bz2

Cd into the Compat directory

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cd compat*

Just to make sure we are in the right place

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ls

You should see something like this-

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compat          config.mk  drivers       include   master-tag  README
compat-release  COPYRIGHT  git-describe  Makefile  net         scripts

Now for the driver-

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make

then-

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sudo make install

and then

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sudo make unload

and finally

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sudo make load

lets make sure our new ath5k module will load on boot

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echo ath5k | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

cleanup (if you feel like it)

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rm -r compat*

Thats it..
reboot and you should be wired for wireless!

Re: How To: Get your atheros wifi working in Mint 6 x64

Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 7:39 am

by Husse

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sudo update-rc.d -f linux-restricted-modules-common remove

If I'm not mistaken that will break your ATI and nvidia graphcis drivers

Or they don't use modules-common?