Does anyone know what chipset the wifi card uses?

Since I intend to install Ubuntu on my One (when it eventually arrives) I am trying to do a little homework in advance.

One of the few areas that still often troubles Ubuntu is the wireless card and despite poking around the net for a while I haven't been able to establish what chipset the wireless card in the One uses. Does anyone know?

I do have a plan B in that I have a Broadcom BCM94306 mini pci module that I could replace the standard card with if necessary but it's a bit of a faff and I'd prefer not to do this unless it is really necessary.

 

Seems to be a Atheros AR5006X.

 

Thank you for that.

Not quite what I wanted to hear as I don't believe that this chipset has native support in Ubuntu but I read on a French forum that ndiswrapper supports this chipset. I have always felt that the ndiswrapper approach was an ugly kludge but on the occasions I have used it, it has worked.

Here is a link on Ubuntu Forums with instructions on how to get the AR5006EG working -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=649019. I hope that the two are sufficiently similar so that the same approach works with both.

May I ask whether you knew the chipset from looking at the module or reading the specs somewhere or did you use lspci to identify it? The reason I ask is that I have read that lspci often reports AR5007 as AR5006.

 

That was the information I got from someone who installed ubuntu on ii.

lspci is telling me: Atheros AR5006EG 802.11 b/g Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

The installed system is using a custom driver from Atheros which might be modified for Acer. It's not working right out of the box with Ubuntu and I found some who got the card to work (finding networks etc...) but none managed to actually connect to a network yet.

 

Ewwww... ndiswrapper. That's quite unfortunate. How come it's so hard for manufacturers to find a wifi card with a real, open Linux driver for a device that's designed to run Linux?

The Wifi card is replaceable, right? Hopefully it won't be like the EeePC where it's somehow locked to Atheros chipsets.

(EDIT: Hmmm... this post indicates there might be a way.)

(EDIT 2: Man, I read these forums in the wrong order. Somebody already got it working.)

 

The wifi card can be deteched however seems like the antenna is sodered to the WIFI card...

 

Nothing a soldering gun cant fix

 

Are you sure about this? It would be very unusual for a mini PCI card and having seen the pictures of the card the connectors look exactly the same as all the other antenna connectors I have seen on mini PCI cards (all of which were removable but they are a bit stiff).

 

In case you don't want windows drivers, I followed this tutorial
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=795984&highlight=ar5001+8.04+madwifi
on a fresh install of ubuntu 8.04.1, and it worked perfectly. The specs on the bottom of the aspire one label the wifi card as an Atheros AR5BXB63, but when i followed tutorials for this specific chipset i couldn't get it to work.

The one thing a did differently was disable HAL in hardware settings, but i kept the chipset "support for Atheros wireless..." enabled.

Oh, and I also used a more recent version of the drivers listed, but NOT the general madwifi driver, as in previous attempts these wouldn't work.
That said, as long as you use this link below instead of the one in the tutorial, it should work a treat.

http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r3366+ar5007.tar.gz

 

Mine doesn't use the 5006EG

My A1 came with an Atheros 5007EG and I'm 100% sure cuz I'm holding it in my hand.
Also the antennae are NOT soldered onto the wireless card.

 

It's the AR5007EG.
One some systems, lspci detects it incorrectly as AR5006EG.

It's relatively easy to get working with Ubuntu. Although updates in Intrepid broke it a few days ago, it can be easily fixed by installing backport modules. Hardy, with its version of backport modules also now supports it.

I have step by step instructions for installing the MadWifi drivers at
http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu ... .html#5007

Do NOT use the MadWifi snapshot linked in a previous post. It's older and won't work with some later updates. The link I just gave tells you how to get the latest snapshot, which is from September 3rd.
(They've stopped putting out the snapshots as there is now kernel support.)

However, if using Ubuntu at this point, the snapshot should not be necessary.

The card is now pretty well supported by most distros---almost any of them that have an EEE PC edition will support it since it was used in the EEE until either 900 or 901 series.