Acer Aspire One, Ath5k, and Ubuntu 9.04

In my last post about the Acer Aspire One (AA1) and Ubuntu 9.04, I mentioned that everything was working in Ath5k land. In retrospect, that post did gloss over a few details, so I thought I'd put up a special AA1 / Ubuntu 9.04 / Ath5k post to clarify a few things.

First off, in a fresh install, it probably just works. Maybe. Maybe not. I have not tried it yet. The AA1 I have started as Alpha 6, and has been doing near daily dist-upgrades to pick up new service along the way. As it pertains to the Ath5k module, new kernels and kernel modules. 2.6.28.11.14 is where I am at right now on the AA1. I saw a new kernel come down on a different test box earlier today, so I need to update again.

Previously on the AA1, under Mint, I was using ndiswrapper to get the wireless going, and when I first got the Ath5k stuff going there were a few tricks to it. First, I had to turn *off* ndiswrapper of course. That was easy: I have installed ndisgtk, so in the GUI, I just removed the driver. Same thing as 'sudo ndiswrapper -r net5416' at at command line

At that point, I could *not* see the wireless any more. This is because of the module 'acer_wmi'. The only problem acer_wmi causes on the AA1 is in the ability of Linux to see the Ath5k... but that is bad enough. A netbook without WIFI is not doing what it is supposed to be doing.

If you read through that bug, it says that the very latest kernel has the patch required to fix this rfkill issue. Will try and update this in a bit.

In the meantime: Simple solution is to blacklist it in /etc/modprobe.d. One line file:

steve@kara:/etc/modprobe.d$ more blacklist-acer-wmi
blacklist acer_wmi

You could also just rmmod acer_wmi, and then 'modprobe ath5k' but blacklisting makes acer_wmi stay out between boots.

Ubuntu 9.04 with ath5k on the AA1 is a lovely thing. Wifi recovers from standby without any issues so far. Under Mint/ndiswrapper about 1 out of every 10 time the WIFI would go away some place, and require severe measures to get it back. It also seems to be faster finding and syncing with WAP's now.

Update

It's working. Mostly

I did an 'sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade' and a new kernel came down: 2.6.28-11.39. if you were to look with 'uname -a' you'd think this was the same kernel, since uname drops the '.39'. Have to do a 'dpkg -l | grep -i 2.6.28-11' or something similar to see what is installed. I then erased my blacklist of the acer_wmi in /etc/modprobe.d (see above)

After the service I rebooted, and it still did not work. I manually did a 'modprobe ath5k', and it started working. puzzled, I looked in /etc/modprobe.d and wondered if the ndiswrapper file there was interfering. I did not put it there: Pretty sure it was created when I installed ndiswrapper. I deleted it (sudo delete /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper) and rebooted.

Instant success. Even see the hidden wireless where I am right now.

The wireless blinking LED is not lit though. Not sure why, and don't really care right now. That is a problem for another day. I am just happy to have the Acer_wmi loading so I can see if that makes a difference in how much the fan runs.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 on the Acer Aspire One... briefly

... or, thank goodness for LiveCD's

In truth, when I tested Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3, it was not with a CD at all. Be kind of hard on the Acer: It has no CD, or DVD. With the price of USB Flash drives, does anyone really need CD's or DVD's any more?

I put 9.04 onto on of my flash drives, and booted it to the LiveCD. it booted quickly and without drama. And without Wireless.

This is an Alpha, so no hard, no foul here. I did not like the decision tree that made it so that new Atheros based wireless cards were pretty much cut off in Ubuntu 8.10, and that was part of why I tried this. I wanted to know if this situation had been worked out yet.

No.

Dmsg showed an error in the HAL when it was looking at the Atheros card. They have not gotten here yet. Even though this is kernel 2.6.28, not 2.6.27, this is still broken for now.

Will keep watching, and keep testing. 9.04 still has most of three months yet before they release GA. Based on Alpha three so far, there is a lot left to do. As Richard Meyer suggested here: I may have to try Fedora again....

In the meantime, pulled the Flash drive, and booted back to Mint 6.

Acer Aspire One: Six commands to a native Atheros driver

There is nothing new in this post that has not been repeated around the Internet (a series of tubes) ... well, not much anyway.

My *next* post will be about Ubuntu 8.10 on an HP DV9000 laptop for the purposes of running VBDOS. It is far more complicated and interesting. This one is pretty simple.

If you are a purist. If you can not stand the idea of running your Acer Aspire One (AAO or AA1) with impure, non-open-source drivers, and you have read here that NDISWRAPPER solves the wireless issues of the AAO and installed it through gritted teeth... then this post is for you. Atheros, being good open source folks, do have a pure, open source solution available to you via the MadWifi project.

It takes six commands to be "pure" (IE, run without binary only sourced drivers such as those NDISWrapper lets you run). It is assumed you have unloaded all the NDIS drivers and stuff. If not, load up NDISGTK (via synaptic or apt-get) and make sure the target system is clear of cruft. The system should have no/zero/none wireless stuff installed before you start step 2 below. Yeah: I suppose removing things first means there is more than six commands...

If you do not have a wired network connection as a backup to the wireless, do step 1 *before* you take off the the NDIS driver....

1. wget http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
   

2. tar xfz madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
   

3. cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz

4. make

5. sudo make install

6. sudo modprobe ath_pci

With this you have real, Linux drivers again rather than NDIS windows drivers as I previously noted. This can be both good and bad. So far on the AAO/AA1 with 8.10 (or actually, Mint 6) I have to unload and reload the ath_pci drivers after every suspend or hibernate. Thus:

1. sudo rmmod ath_pci
2. sudo modprobe ath_pci

Sucks... still looking for a better way. Not being a purist, I went back to NDISWrapper for now.