In October 2008 I found blog posts on how I might get wireless working on my laptop that has an Atheros AR242x card. A third party driver form madwifi had to be installed. There was a caution that a kernel update might require re-installation. Later that month Intrepid was released and I chose not to upgrade. Similarly, I skipped the Jaunty upgrade as well. Recent livecd’s of Ubuntu (and other distros too) enabled wireless on the laptop. I thought an upgrade would leave me with working wireless. I was very wrong.

The Karmic livecd worked fine including wireless. I decided that it was time to upgrade. I opened a terminal and issued the command ‘upgrade-manager -d’. Ubuntu informed me that an upgrade would take several hours and once started could not be stopped. Okay, let’s do it! It was early Thursday afternoon. Karmic was not installed. Instead, Intrepid was slowly installed, most of the time taken by downloading around 1400 packages. Toward the end of the install Ubuntu asked if I wanted to keep the installed menu.lst file? I wisely answered “Yes”.

Friday morning I repeated the procedure fully aware that this would result in Jaunty and not Karmic. By noon the upgrade was complete but there was a glitch. This time the install failed to keep the menu.lst file. Wireless was broken. For the final upgrade I attached the laptop to the router with an ethernet cable and repeated the procedure for the final time. Everything was complete by late afternoon. I disconnected the cable and rebooted the machine. Wireless did not work. No wireless networks could be found. This was very puzzling. The livecd worked fine but the upgraded system did not. Several reboots of both the livecd and the laptop finally revealed the cause of the problem. The livecd had the ath5k driver from madwifi installed. The upgrade did not install the third party driver!

The installation of the driver has changed a bit since October 2008. A post on ubuntugeek was very helpful, but not quite complete. In addition to the post’s instructions I had to add the ath5k driver to the /etc/modules file so that it would load at start-up. At 2:00 A.M. Saturday morning, the upgrade was finally complete. I should be good until the next kernel upgrade. You can bet that I’ll be backing up the driver to a secure location. Finally, I’m a bit irritated that Ubuntu does not recognize the condition, does not keep the installed driver and does not give any warning!