Intrepid Ibex

No not transferring large files or anything. Regular 'web surfing', etc.
Here is what I did...
sudo apt-get remove inux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic
Then I installed the mad wifi drivers as per the aspire one ubuntu document.
I added ath_pci.
Rebooted, and wifi is working much better
Any explanation for that?

Mike

 

Sure, the explanation is that the driver works better than the built in kernel driver. Also, judging from the posts today, the latest upgrade did something to the ath5k module so that it doesn't work. (Whether that's Ubuntu or the kernel people I have no idea. I haven't had any trouble with Fedora Rawhide, however, I think they tend to update kernels a bit more quickly--this isn't necessarily a good thing, Fedora's latest updates usually break something as it's torn between being a nice desktop and a developer's distro and can never make up its mind.

So, my guess, but only a guess, is that something went a bit wrong with the latest Ubuntu ath5k driver. The other driver, Sam's MadWifi snapshot, should continue to work with the inconvenience that you will have to do the make uninstall, make clean and make install each time the kernel is upgraded.

 

I have a dual boot with this Aspire One (windows xp, and ubuntu 8.1). I have never had even a little bit of trouble with Windows XP wifi.. but the Ubuntu seems to be a constant struggle. Will this ever be smoothed out?
I don't want to use Windows, but finding Ubuntu is a crap shoot everyday whether it will even work!

 

If you're using Ubuntu Intrepid, be aware that you're dealing with a beta release. If you're using Hardy, once you get the wifi done (and that wasn't Ubuntu's fault, it was Atheros for being erm, doody-heads about releasing Linux drivers), you shouldn't have such adventures.

For what it's worth, this seems to be an Ubuntu only issue--upgrades of SimplyMepis 8 and even Fedora, which tends to take chances with Rawhide, frequently breaking things, hasn't had a problem with their kernel versions and this card.

You might consider SimplyMepis8. Despite the relatively small group of developers (and I believe one of them has an AA1) it seems to pay a great deal of attention to quality. It's KDE rather than Gnome based, but at any rate, it was one of the first Just Works (TM) distros, before Ubuntu came into being and eclipsed it.

That being said, Ubuntu usually does a good job of testing--any hard core Ubuntu bug reporters here, please let them know, if a bug hasn't already been filed, that this seems to be an Ubuntu, not an upstream, issue, as it's not happening with Fedora's Rawhide updates. (Nor Mepis).

 

Seriously, that's not a very clever thing to say about an OS that is in beta.

I am also disappointed about this as the wireless driver has always worked perfectly on my One, but you have to accept that it is in beta and so it still being tested - if you want something stable, don't use a beta OS.

Intrepid so far works the best of all the OSs I have tried (with the exception, I am sad to say, of XP) including Linpus. Linpus supports all the hardware but I cannot think of anything much else positive to say about it.

I have resorted to using a USB wireless adapter (an Edimax EW7317UG if you are interested) for the time being. I am lucky in that I have a drawerful of wireless adapters to try. I do hope they roll this back in though. It worked perfectly for me and I really don't want to have to keep recompiling the Madwifi drivers every time the kernel changes.

 

Ah, don't be lazy--it takes two minutes.
Yes, I know it is a nuisance, though I had a little script to do it for me. Not terribly complex.
cd ~/madwifi (I'd already renamed the directory with the 9/03/08 snapshot to MadWifi to save typing.)
make uninstall
make clean
make -j3
make install
modprobe ath_pci

Then, each kernel upgrade, I would just run sudo madwifi.sh and in 3 minutes (plus or minus) it was done.

Having now tried about 7 distros on my 160 GB version I'd probably say Intrepid and Mepis8 are the easiest to get working. (Till this bug with the ath5k driver.) Fedora and Elive are also relatively easy (Fedora rawhide, soon to be F10).
GOS installed easily, but one has to manually install the MadWifi drivers as you would with Hardy.
CentOS takes work, but thanks to Alan Bartlett, and perhaps me, as I kept nagging him about it, is pretty easy as long as there's already another distro on the drive. (You need to install both wired and wireless drivers, as well as an rpm for sound to work.)
Once CentOS is installed, though it runs quite well .
The hard drive versions seem to be as easy to use with other distributions as most other laptops in that area (80-160 gig drives, gig of RAM, generally lower end components.)

Due to its slow write speed, the SSD drive though, is probably a different story. It's the main reason I returned my original purchase for the HD version.

 

Well, there does seem to be an issue that certain people's AA1s work fine with the 'in-kernel' ath5k driver (including me, and including after this latest update and having to install the backports modules package.

Whereas others find that doesn't work, but the madwifi drivers work fine. In fact a friend today (who doesn't read this forum) who has one, found the backports modules didn't work, but just enabled the restricted drivers and it worked - no downloading and building of newer madwifi drivers.

Do different AA1s have slightly different atheros models?

And has intrepid's restricted drivers version of ath_pci caught up enough that users can just use that now?

ath5k in the current linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic works perfectly on mine. lspci -nn shows it as:

Code:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter [168c:001c] (rev 01)

Do people who find ath5k doesn't work have a different model?

 

I have the same model, and ath5k does kind of work. It connects most of the time, but with a much worst signal quality than the madwifi drivers. It also manages to do some hard locks, where alt-sysreq won't help.

 

You raise an interesting question and I have been wondering the same thing. My wireless has worked flawlessly since alpha 5 (after I blacklisted ath_pci) but there do seem to be very variable results. It seem highly unlikely that all the variability is down to users alone.

 

This did the trick for me too.

 

Code:

~$ modprobe -l | grep ath
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_hal.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_pci.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_rate_amrr.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_rate_minstrel.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_rate_onoe.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile/ath_rate_sample.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath9k/ath9k.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/md/multipath.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/kernel/drivers/md/dm-multipath.ko

Umm.... something missing today. What happened to my ath5k? Oh well. it was unstable/incomplete anyway. I'll give ath_pci another crack.

[edit] installed the backport modules:

Code:

$ dmesg | grep ath
[   13.946237] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
[   13.946273] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[   13.946342] ath5k_pci 0000:03:00.0: registered as 'phy0'
[   16.583675] ath5k phy0: Atheros AR2425 chip found (MAC: 0xe2, PHY: 0x70)

Working again! Woo!

 

That does not help for me :S can't connect to my wpa2-network on the office.

 

The aptitude install backports worked for me too.

@dr3as
Did you remember to once again blacklist ath_pci afterwards and do a modprobe ath5k after installing the backports?

 

Still dead here too.

Installed the backports module, modprobed ath5k and verified ath_pci was still in my blacklist file (it was). So wifi seems to be out of the question for me until at least the release later this week (if they put it back into the kernel I guess) unless anyone has some other idea. Perhaps Hardy with the netbook remix, which would be too bad as I had Intrepid setup pretty well, wifi and alll...

 

The other option is to reinstall the MadWifi drivers. (And this time, blacklist ath5k).
That is what I was doing until I saw the post about backports.

 

Just keep messing with it, it took me a couple of tries to get it working... But i haven't a clou what got it working in the end...

 

Interesting. I wonder if there's a pattern to the wifi base stations where people are having problems or not.

ath5k in linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic works fine for me. No apparent issues at all, and good reception throughout my house. Base station is a (new) Apple Airport Extreme... I haven't had the opportunity to try any others since this upgrade.

 

I made a clean install to Ubuntu 8.10 RC1on my A110 yesterday. After first boot network-manager crashed, after the second reboot X would not start. Reinstalling and applying updates before reboot fixed this (probably ath5k beeing withdrawn).

Now I have a working system (with great 3G-modem support ). However two problems remain:

1. The fan keeps running. I have updated to BIOS 3305 and installed acerfand (version 0.04).Both rc.local and acerfand are executable. However acerfand does not seem to be running when i log in (ps -A | grep acerfand returns nothing). Starting the daemon manually with sudo acerfand works fine... My conclusion is that rc.local is not run.

2. Playing sound works, but when the speakers are not muted they give out static noise. I have not rebuilt alsa as is recommended for 8.04.

Is anyone else experiencing these issues?

 

Can you run your rc.local manually? I think of something in it that prevents the rest of the file being executed. That is what previously happened to me...

 

Thank you!

Running rc.local manually revealed two problems: 1) I had entered a typo (/user/local/bin/acerfand and 2) ethtool was not installed by default (but is used by the rc.local example in the Ubuntu wiki to disable wake-on-lan).

Fixing these fixed the fan noise.