Ariel’s Playground & Toy Factory

Several friends have been asking me how I made my wireless device in my MacBook running Ubuntu Linux worked. Others with different brands of laptops have shared also the same problem. I discovered that most of these laptops (MacBook included) have wireless devices with the same Atheros chipsets.

To check if your laptop have Atheros, do:

lspci | grep Wireless

The result:

02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5418 802.11abgn Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

will tell you that you have the Atheros chipsets.

So here’s what you need to do to make your wireless work in Ubuntu:

1. First, make sure you have an alternative Internet connection through your wired ethernet port.

2. For Ubuntu (8.04) Hardy, you just need to install linux-restricted-modules and madwifi-tools packages:

sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules madwifi-tools

Prior to Hardy with my laptop installed with Ubuntu (7.10) Gutsy, here’s what I did using Subversion (try this if the first instruction won’t work in Hardy):

- Install Subversion to get the driver source and the needed build tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essential subversion autoconf automake

- Get madwifi using subversion:

svn co http://svn.madwifi.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi

- Compile and install madwifi driver (module name: ath_pci)

cd madwifi
make
sudo make install-modules

The driver is now installed and will be enabled after the next reboot or can be enabled by:

sudo modprobe ath_pci

I was always having difficulty connecting using network manager, so I installed an alternative: wicd.

1. To install wicd you need to add to your repository (append to /etc/apt/sources.list) the line:
“deb http://apt.wicd.net hardy extras”

You can do this by:

echo “deb http://apt.wicd.net hardy extras” >> /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Update your repository:

sudo apt-get update

3. Install wicd:

sudo apt-get install wicd

Note: this will remove your network manager.

You can then run wicd from the menu -> Applications -> Internet.

References:

• Instructions to configure your wireless settings using wicd and more information can be found at the wicd website: http://wicd.net/
• More on Madwifi and Atheros on Ubuntu at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Madwifi
• For MacBook specific, see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook?highlight=(macbook)#Wireless