wifi help
 

I have a Toshiba A205 and need help getting my wifi card working. I have an atheros card and googled all the tutorials on how to install it onto ubuntu 8.04.1 but nothing ever helps. Is there a video that I can go to, because I swear this is the most frustrating thing ever. I do all the terminal stuff step by step but when it comes time for me to do the whole sudo make and sudo install I just get "failed" and "stop" errors. What the hell?

Yes, I do the whole essential build line after getting the correct snapshot, but I still get error messages.

OK, first you really need to read the forum guidelines on "How to ask a question".

Your post leaves us wondering about several things that I've highlighted in the quote.

Specifically:

1) Which Atheros card do you have? (i.e., it's model number)
2) What "terminal stuff" did you do? Which tutorial's "step by step" instructions did you follow?
3) Which "snapshot" are you using? Why?
4) What, specific, error messages did you get? Do you have the correct development tools and kernel header files installed? (Ubuntu does not, normally, install the development tools, although they are easily available from the repositories.)
5) What is the "essential build line?"

We also need to know if you are using the 64-bit Ubuntu release or the 32-bit version. It would also help if you included your hardware specifications. A Toshiba A205 may mean something to you, but for those of us who don't closely follow the hardware market, the information is just you telling us to Google the machine specifications because you can't be bothered.

I have an Atheros ar242x card, or so the Ubuntu terminal tells me. Here are the exact instructions I'm following:
First go to System–>Administration–>Hardware Drivers” and disable by un-ticking the following option

Atheros Hardware Access Layer (Hal)

Then Reboot your system.

Preparing your system

sudo apt-get install build-essential

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`


Then open the terminal from Applications–>Accessories–>Terminal and copy the following command

wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special...+ar5007.tar.gz

tar xfz madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

sudo make
(No target to "install". STOP)

sudo make install

sudo modprobe ath_pci

iwconfig (to check for ath0 response)

sudo reboot

The only commands that follow through are the wget and the sudo reboot, all of the other ones say there is no target to install/make. This is a completely clean install, the most of done before this was open openoffice and play with the themes.

O.K., that's useful. I'm have the same Atheros device in my laptop, and have to re-compile the driver every time the Ubuntu (or anyone else's) kernel changes.

<edit>
I just noticed that I'm using a more current snapshot than you: madwifi-ng-r3366+ar5007
Perhaps you should download that one.
</edit>

So: Can you do a ls madwifi-ng-r2756+ar500 to verify that you've got everything. Here's what you should see:(I keep my madwifi source files in /usr/src/ath, so my argument to the ls command is different, but the directory contents should be the same.)

If your directory doesn't look like mine, try using the archive extraction tool from the application menu to re-extract the archive contents. (I've forgotten what the GNOME tool is called. It's ark in Kubuntu.)

By the way, remember that Linux system usually implement "tab completion," so all you need to type in the terminal window would be ls mad<tab>. If nothing happens after one <tab>, a second <tab> will usually show you all the possible "completions" and redisplay your input so you can add more characters and push <tab> again. It's sometimes amusing to see how many commands you could use if you wanted to by pressing a couple of <tab>s at the prompt: