David R. Heffelfinger

Ubuntu 9.04 (aka "Jaunty Jackalope) was released earlier this week.

Today I set away some time to install it on my laptop, an HP dv6810us, part of the Hewlett Packard dv6000 series.

Almost everything worked "out of the box", unfortunately the wireless still takes some work to set up.

In the past I had been using ndiswrapper
to get it to work. This time it wasn't necessary, but it still took
some effort to get it going. It would be nice if the wireless would
work out of the box.

In any case, lspci -v returns the following information for my wireless card:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 137a
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
    Memory at f6000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
    Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
    Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Mask- TabSize=1
    Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting <?>
    Capabilities: [140] Virtual Channel <?>
    Kernel driver in use: ath5k
    Kernel modules: ath_pci, ath5k



I googled around to see if I could find a solution, and bumped into this thread in the Ubuntu forums. The thread is for Intrepid, but I thought I would adapt the solution to Jaunty and see if it worked.

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

Rebooted and... nothing!

Since
the solution didn't work, I uninstalled the above package and, lo and
behold, like magic and for no apparent reason, the wireless started
working!

I suspect that one of the dependencies on that package
did the trick, I'm not sure which one (I can't even remember which
dependencies were automatically downloaded), but installing the above
package, then uninstalling it did the trick. Weird, but it worked.

Now wireless is working without ndiswrapper.

Other
than the wireless, the installation was very smooth. Ubuntu
automatically detected my Nvidia card on the first boot, and asked me
if I wanted to install the restricted drivers. I did, rebooted and the
driver "just worked".