Wireless Networking on EeePC 701 – Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid”

By | 2008/11/02
11 Comments

I reinstalled my Asus EeePC 701 this morning with Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” final release.  To my surprise the wireless no longer worked whereas it did in previous releases (beta, etc).  Jumping into IRC I was able to find a fix however, and here it is.

Installing Backported Kernel Modules

You’ll need to install a backported kernel module package.  In order to do this you’ll also need to activate the backports repository.  You can do that in two ways.

  1. Navigate to System > Admin > Software Sources :: Updates :: (intrepid-backports)
  2. Add “deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse“

After you’ve done either of the above you can then run these commands to install the package:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
echo "blacklist ath_pci" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

At this point you should be able to reboot and you’re done.  Enjoy.

11 thoughts on “Wireless Networking on EeePC 701 – Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid””

  1. Asheesh Laroia

    Thanks for these instructions. Can you remove the smart quotes from the post? They make copying and pasting hard, and they particularly messed up my pasting of the text to “tee” into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

  2. Wes

    Thanks for the tutorial but I’m still having problems. I’m using 8.10 UMPC on my EeePC 900HA. I’m having the same wireless problems you described. I can’t use the aptitude command. It says its not found. When I ran apt-get install aptitude it said I needed to be root. So I ran sudo apt-get install aptitude and it says “E: Malformed line 56 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list (dist parse)
    E: The list of sources could not be read.”
    Not sure what I’m doing wrong or why everything I try to do in linux takes four hours.

  3. Ben2K

    I have the same problem since “upgrading” to 8.10 with a Fujitsu with the 2200BG networking, and can’t connect to a secured network, but I can to an open access point. Tried your instructions, but its still broken 🙁

  4. Serafeim

    I have Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO pa2510. I tried your instructions and still the wireless doesn’t work. When i put the command:
    sudo modprobe -i ath_pci
    in a console it gives me back the following:
    WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist line 46: ignoring bad line starting with ‘“blacklist’

    What’s the matter? How can I get the wireless to work?

    THX!!

  5. Christer Edwards Post author

    @Serafeim – double-check your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file for:

    blacklist ath_pci

    modprobe -r ath_pci
    modprobe ath5k

  6. anzan

    Excellent. It worked beautifully. Thank you very much for this and all of the work you do with this site. (I’ve disabled AdBlock.)

  7. smiler

    how are you supposed to do this with no net connection….?!

  9. Vince

    THANKS FOR THE POST IT WORKED FINALLY!

  10. Lane

    Every time I see something like this, I get tempted to try installing U on my 701. But I don't have an external CD drive and installing the XEPC upgrade to the standard Xandros with a USB flash took a bit of fiddling, and I don't want to mess things up. Also with XEPC I have a mod that switches the arrow keys to more sensible locations, and I wouldn't want to give that up.

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