Bug#513985: madwifi-source: Atheros AR242x in Thinkpad SL500 doesn't work

[Ernesto Hernández-Novich (USB)]

Package: madwifi-source
Version: 0.9.4+r3772.20080716-1
Severity: normal


I have a brand new ThinkPad SL500 which includes an

Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter

It has PCI ID 168c:001c

Using Lenny Installer RC2 the card was detected correctly and the kernel
attempted to use the ath5k driver, that doesn't have support for this card 
in kernel 2.6.26, so I installed madwifi-source using module-assistant.

The process worked the usual way and the module was successfully installed.
I blacklisted ath5k and rebooted. The ath_pci module got inserted along with
its dependencies and the card appeared to be detected, however I was unable to
connect to any WLAN: unencrypted, WEP, WPA or WPA2 did not make any
difference since the card wouldn't associate at all.

I downloaded madwifi-trunk-current (r3937 as of 2009-01-30), built,
installed and it DID NOT work either. I then downloaded
madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current (r3938 as of 2009-01-30), built, installed
and it DID work.

This problem will happen to anyone with a Thinkpad SL300, SL400, SL500 and
T500 with the standard Atheros WiFi mini-PCI Express card Lenovo is
including from september 2008 onward so I guess updating the module to
the latest release is important. Note that the ath5k driver in Lenny's
kernel does not support this card and neither does the ath5k in 2.6.27.

This happens under i386 and amd64.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
Architecture: amd64
Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)