Mint 7 and Toshiba NB205 with Atheros AR9285?

[calibre97]

I'd like to get Mint 7 on my Toshiba NB205-N311 with the Atheros AR9285 wireless chip. The LAN port works fine, but there's no wireless from the Live CD (from an attached external USB LG DVD drive). According to other posts in the Ubuntu forums, the AR9285 is supported by kernel 2.6.29, but Mint 7 is at 2.6.28-nn.

I have the Windows driver from Toshiba, but its' all setup.exe and *.cab files so there's no INF file to grab to use with ndiswrapper (Windows Wireless Drivers from the Mint Control Panel).

Anyone got any ideas or links?

[calibre97]

As reported in the Ubuntu forums, Fedora 11 live cd finds the wireless and connects just fine. Guess I'll have to go with Fedora for now and then jump back to Mint when the newer kernel is available, maybe for Koala.

[calibre97]

After the following install, from a Ubuntu forum visit, my NB205 wireless worked:

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

Can you please detail the steps you took? I did the following:
1. Installed from the Live CD, then rebooted with Ethernet cable attached.
2. Installed updates.
3. Ran command:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
4. Rebooted.

And still had nothing. Wireless light is on, it works in Windows and briefly worked when I had Fedora 11 installed (always works with Fedora Live CD booted).

What is it you did? Install Mint, run the install and then presto! You have wireless?

[calibre97]

I finally got Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed and configured with sound, albeit headphones only, and wireless. Never did with Mint. Now that's 2 of you claiming you got it working. Can you provide details about the sequence of events? As in 1. Booted to Mint Live CD or USB stick (oh snap. is that it? I started from a CD). 2. Run installer. 3. Reboot. 4. Run sudo apt-get install command for backports. 5. ??? Is step 5 reboot and then you have wireless? Did you at any point allow Mint to update itself? There were a TON of updates for me.

I'm getting used to UNR and I don't want to go throught the slog of updating again for naught, but I do have a backup of the UNR partition and so I may be willing to try again if there are some more concrete steps to follow. Any help greatly appreciated.

[McMacHack]

The way I fixed it was by giving and buying a Broadcom A/G/N Wifi PCIX chip from Dell and swapped it out. Broadcom is the only wifi chip that works in all three OS options; Linux, Windows and Mac. It was only $40 and in my opinion Broadcom is better than Atheros.

I can't get the audio to work though.