I have an Acer Aspire 3680-2022, and shorty after I bought it about two years ago and installed Ubuntu (7.04, I think), it worked fine. However something happened and my wireless network drivers disappeared. Anyways I've tryed to install the new Ubuntu 7.10, and have used the guides on Ubuntuforums.com to get it working but still nothing.

So, I'm getting a little tired of playing this game with Ubuntu. I just want a distro that will get me working with working wifi. I'll even use Fedora if that will do it. So if anyone has had success with a linux distribution on this kind of laptop please let me know which.

Also are there native drivers for Atheros (sp?) chip set? If possible I'd like to avoid the trouble of using ndiswrapper to get the drivers installed and working.

Thanks.

Have you actually installed the latest madwifi drivers from source?
That would be the next thing to try to me. Build the source for the kernel.

Now if you go Fedora there are three choices.
1. Search here on using yum to install madwifi and the matching kmod for runing kernel.

2. Extract the madwifi source and have kernel-devel-******.rpm installed for matching kernel. Boot up in new kernel and build the source of madwifi to work with matching kernel.

3. Install madwifi rpm with dkms support, plus dkms rpm, and the kernel source which is the kernel-devel-*********.rpm. The ********** must be the same version as the kernel running. Now on reboot to new kernel if dkms and kernel source is present it will build the modules for atheros based chipsets. Usually requires a second reboot because if ath_pci is loaded through madprobe.conf file. Reason is modprobe.conf would try to load it but it has not been built because default dkms builds further down the boot sequence.

Remember in Fedora and building madwifi and using precompiled kernel rpms you must have the matching kernel-devel-******.rpm for the new kernel installed before compiling. Also if you install a new kernel you must go through the process again to compile to work on the new kernel.

Brian

If you have a AR5007EG card, which many 3680's have, it isn't supported by any normal build of madwifi, there are special patches available, but support for these cards is experimental. Ndiswrapper is a lot less hassle for this card, and it does work better at the moment.

Not saying this is what you have, but it is something to look for before getting frustrated with madwifi. Another note, 'lspci' likes to say this card is an AR5006EG, which is a supported card, but not always what is really there.

Acer 3680-2633 here running ArchLinux.