I had a tough time getting my Atheros wireless card recognized on my laptop. Initially, Mandriva recognized my WEP network out of the box. However, I later had problems. In hindsight, it was WPA networks that caused flakiness.

Ultimately, I needed two solutions to get things working. I'll list what I did in chronological order, but perhaps it's only the second item that'd be sufficient.

1. I tried Yahoo Answers first, which links to Linux Wireless. To summarize:
   • Install updates.
   • Download the compat-wireless driver (presumably the most recent one) from here.
   • Unpackage the tarball:

     tar jxvf compat-wireless-(whatever).tar.bz2

   • Change to the unpackaged directory.

   • sudo make

   • sudo make install

   • sudo make unload

   • sudo make load

   • Restart.
   Wifi worked temporarily. However, the next time I installed updates, it stopped working.
2. Next, I tried Ubuntu Forums. All I needed to do was install linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic. Between these two fixes, wifi has been fine, through multiple updates. I'm not sure if this second fix would've alone sufficed.
3. I didn't try much from the following, but this discussion at LinuxQuestions.org seemed interesting. It describes the command athload.

Maybe these fixes aren't specific to Ubuntu, but i went through three installations to get things working (Mandriva, Zenwalk, and Xubuntu). I suppose this is where Ubuntu's popularity comes in handy, with the large user group. Hopefully distributors will get wifi out of the box in their next releases. With the popularity of UMPCs, it'd be a good time to make inroads, and the flakiness of wifi will impede that.

This page is Lynx-enhanced