Fixing the madwifi driver on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) Netbook Remix
Earlier this year I bought my wife an Acer Aspire One AOA110 netbook. I installed UNR (Jaunty 9.04) which worked perfectly from the the Live USB image, but once installed It couldn’t see any wireless networks. In the end I blacklisted the madwifi drivers and switched to the ath5k atheros driver, and everything seemed to be ok. In the past few weeks we found that the wireless connection would regulary drop, and network manager would then take 30 seconds or so to connect to the router again. This was very annoying. It seemed to happen more often when transferring larger amounts of data, like uploading images to facebook. The message being written to /var/log/messages was:
ath5k phy0: unsupported jumbo
In the end I compiled the latest madwifi source code by hand, and re-enabled the driver. Here is what I had to do:
- Blacklist the ath5k driver. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf:blacklist ath5k
blacklist acer_wmi - Add the following to the /etc/modules file to ensure the madwifi driver is loadedath_pci
- Install Subversion:sudo apt-get install subversion
- Extract the latest madwifi source code from the subversion server:svn co http://svn.madwifi-project.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi
- Build it:cd madwifi/scripts
sudo ./find-madwifi-modules.sh -r
cd ..
make
sudo make install - Reboot.
If everything went well your wireless will work as usual, but will be running the madwifi drivers, and not the ath5k atheros driver. If you do experience any problems, change the entry in the blacklist to ath_pci, change the entry in /etc/modules to ath5k, restart networking (or reboot) and you should be back on the ath5k driver.
