My Toshiba netbook NB205 was pre-installed with Windows XP. After extensive manipulation of partitions, the original Windows XP installation was gone. I booted my old Linux from a USB thumb drive but couldn't go online for lack of a Linux driver for the built-in Atheros AR9285 wireless card. So I looked for the AR9285 Windows driver because my Linux kernel has ndiswrapper support. I found a working driver (x600_wlan785_x_nb.zip) at the MSI support site.
After I downloaded x600_wlan785_x_nb.zip, I unzipped it. A new directory XP_7.7.0.348_20090701 is created.
unzip x600_wlan785_x_nb.zip
There you'll find two drivers, athw.sys and athwx.sys. Go to the ndis5x directory.
cd XP_7.7.0.348_20090701/ndis5x/
Install the Windows driver to be used with ndiswrapper.
ndiswrapper -i netathw.inf
The ndiswrapper tool will copy the Windows driver to a folder in /etc/ndiswrapper. To check your ndiswrapper installation, run the following command:
ndiswrapper -l
If you haven't, load the ndiswrapper kernel module.
modprobe ndiswrapper
Then, use your favorite Wireless configuration tool to connect to your wireless network.
The atheros AR92xx support is flaky at best with distributions built around the 2.26.xx kernel. I've got an NB205, and Fedora Core 11, Ubuntu 9, Moblin 2.1, SLED 11, and Debian 5 all exhibit the same symptoms: random network disconnect, and the eventual need for a reboot when a restart of the networking system won't re-establish connection.
ReplyDeleteOpenSolaris 2009.06 worked ok with the chipset, after I applied the latest updates and downloaded and installed the driver. And, of course, Windows support is fine :(
I agree with Neo that the native Linux driver for Atheros chips are not as reliable as Windows driver. I installed Moblin 2.0 on my Toshiba NB205, and the ath9k connection drops so often. But in Pardus Linux, the native Linux driver works fine. On Debian 5, I still use the old Linux kernel 2.6.18.8 for stability reason and the Windows driver is the only option for me to get Atheros AR92XX working with old kernels.
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