Ubuntu 9.04 activate atheros 242 wireless

I found this trouble in my employee’s notebook. It is a advan notebook with atheros 242 wireless chipset. The original module in Ubuntu 9.04 doesn’t seem fit to control the chipset. So according to the source in

Aktivasi Atheros AR242x pada Ubuntu 9.04


Jaunty need extra madwifi module to run the chipset.

This is how to install the module.
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Download madwifi driver here.

Disable Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) and Support for Atheros 802.11 wireless lan cards in menu System > Administration > Hardware Drivers, then reboot.
Edit the linux-restricted-modules-common to make sure the ath_hal will be disable forever.
$ sudo gedit /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common
Add ath_hal on Disabled_Modules.

DISABLED_MODULES=”ath_hal”

Now let’s extract the madwifi module.
$ tar xzvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
And enter to its directory
$ cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r4068-20090705

Run the madwifi-unload and find-madwifi-modules.sh
$ sudo ./madwifi-unload
$ sudo ./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)

Out from its directory by
$ cd ..

Make sure the previous driver is clean
$ make clean

Back to madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r4068-20090705, and compile its module
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe ath_pci

Then reboot your notebook and your atheros now work.

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