I have a few old reliable AR5005G (5212, PCI 168c:0013) cards, both MiniPCI and Cardbus from the heyday of Wireless-G back in the early ’00s. Back then, Atheros 500x series cards were THE cards to have if you wanted to have some fun with aircrack, or if you just wanted your WiFi to actually WORK, especially under Linux. The madwifi (aka ath_pci) drivers were probably the most stable wireless drivers at the time. Even on Windows, you could use 3rd party drivers to put the cards in monitor mode and capture packets.
Times have changed and madwifi has been superseded by ath5k (and indirectly ath9k).
For some reason I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 on an old Fujitsu Lifebook (Pentium III 600MHz, upgraded 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon M4) without built-in wireless, using a Netgear WPN511 Cardbus adapter. I expected everything to work as it did in the old days, but for some reason the WiFi wouldn’t stay connected.
It seems the hardware encryption capabilites on the card don’t quite support WPA2/CCMP-AES, even though the ath5k driver says it does. So the solution is to disable hardware encryption support:
echo "options ath5k nohwcrypt=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/ath5k.conf
Then reboot, or reload the ath5k module (modprobe -rv ath5k, modprobe -v ath5k).
Now I can enjoy my surprisingly not-extremely-slow 10-year old laptop wirelessly.
Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12086356#post12086356
http://madwifi-project.org/
Hardware, Linux, Software
| 
ar5005, ar500x, ar5212, ath5k, atheros, disconnect, driver, encryption, linux, ubuntu, wifi, wireless, wpa, wpa2
If you have a “legacy” Intel chipset (and apparently legacy means anything not from the Core i era), the new AHCI/ATA driver Intel lists on their site (“Intel Rapid Storage Technology” ) isn’t compatible with older chipsets.
I have a few ICH7, ICH8 (also used for VirtualBox’s AHCI controller), ICH9, ICH10 and ESB2 southbridge chipsets and have found that the Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.9 works.
I’ve attached the Windows installer, as well as the 64 and 32-bit “F6” floppy driver packages, because it seems Intel can’t be trusted to keep old versions of their drivers easily available.
I’m currently running Ubuntu Natty as my primary OS at work.
My setup is a Precision T3500 workstation that came with two NVIDIA Quadro cards which were a nightmare for Linux support. I heard that ATI cards supported 3 monitors on one card, as long as one of them was DisplayPort. I saw a cheap Radeon HD 5450 on sale for about $40, so I picked it up only to notice that it had an HDMI port instead of DisplayPort. I figured I’d try it anyway and was surprised to find that with the open-source radeon driver, 3 monitors work! One is connected by VGA, one HDMI and one DVI.
I had, however been experiencing random X crashes, and I suspect the problem was with the radeon driver.
Currently testing out some updated xorg drivers found at:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?50038-Updated-and-Optimized-Ubuntu-Free-Graphics-Drivers
My system specs:
$ sudo lshw -short
H/W path Device Class Description
====================================================
system Precision WorkStation T3500 ()
/0 bus 09KPNV
/0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS
/0/400 processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 2.80GHz
/0/400/700 memory 256KiB L1 cache
/0/400/701 memory 1MiB L2 cache
/0/400/704 memory 8MiB L3 cache
/0/1000 memory 14GiB System Memory
/0/1000/0 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/1 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/2 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/3 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/4 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/5 memory DIMM DDR3 Synchronous [empty]
/0/100 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port
/0/100/1 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1/0 eth0 network 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/3 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3
/0/100/3/0 display Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450]
/0/100/3/0.1 multimedia Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]
/0/100/7 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 7
/0/100/14 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management Registers
/0/100/14.1 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad Registers
/0/100/14.2 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS Registers
/0/100/1a bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
/0/100/1a.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
/0/100/1a.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6
/0/100/1a.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1b multimedia 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
/0/100/1c bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1c.5 bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6
/0/100/1c.5/0 eth1 network NetXtreme BCM5761 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
/0/100/1d bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1d.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1d.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
/0/100/1d.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1e bridge 82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1f bridge 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller
/0/100/1f.2 scsi0 storage 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller
/0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 250GB ST3250318AS
/0/100/1f.2/0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 101MiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/100/1f.2/0/2 /dev/sda2 volume 4102MiB Linux swap volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/3 /dev/sda3 volume 20GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/4 /dev/sda4 volume 208GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/sdb disk 1500GB WDC WD15EARS-00M
/0/100/1f.2/1/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 499GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/1/2 /dev/sdb2 volume 897GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/2 /dev/cdrom disk DVD-ROM TS-H353C
/0/100/1f.2/3 /dev/cdrw disk DVD+-RW TS-H653F
/0/100/1f.2/3/0 /dev/cdrw disk
/0/100/1f.3 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller
I bought a cheap Agere Gigabit Ethernet ExpressCard. The CD that came with it included some Windows XP drivers, but Windows 7 32 and 64-bit drivers were impossible to find anywhere but on Windows Update.
Fortunately, the Targa Traveller 1720 ML42 has this NIC built in, so the drivers were available on http://www.service.targa.co.uk/. I have extracted the drivers for XP32, 7 32 and 7 64, download below.
Agere ET131x.7z
The Netgear WNDA3100 is a pretty nice wireless adapter, but the drivers from Netgear are bundled with a crappy management software. I extracted the basic driver files from the .exe provided so that I can install the hardware using the Windows standard methods.
The 7z contains the Windows XP/2003 and Vista/7 drivers.
WNDA3100v1 Driver
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