I had a laptop die with a hardware death this past week, on which I had happily been running the pre-Beta Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. Upon replacing my laptop with a seemingly identical machine, I attempted to install the Beta release 7.04. When I installed I realized that the new laptop had the Atheros 5212 wireless card in it, rather than the Intel wireless that my first one had. For some reason I was never able to make it work even after going through the steps at www.madwifi.org that deal specifically with Atheros cards. Knowing that I had things working nicely with my previous card, I took it out of the old laptop and put it in the new one. For some reason, I still was not able to get wireless networking functional. The card would be detected, but I was never able to scan for networks or connect directly to one. After wasting most of a day on this, I decided to roll back to Edgy since I *knew* I had that combination working at one point. Still.... no love. I have had good luck with Mandriva One, so I decided to try that one as well.... nothing. I decided I would try a new-to-me distro of openSUSE 10.2. Still nothing!

In talking to Aaron Lynch I learned that apparently HP/Compaq laptops can be picky when it comes to swapping mini-pci network cards, and he suggested that perhaps I should pop the Atheros back in and give it another shot.

I took his advice, and did a complete new installation of openSUSE. After installing, there was no evidence of my card in networking, but I was able to see it as a pci device by running lspci at the terminal prompt.

I then went about installing the MadWifi stuff, but found that openSUSE makes this incredibly easy! Here are the steps I took to get it working.

• First we need to add the MadWifi repo. To do this, open the Control Center, then open YaST Administrator Settings. Click on Installation Source, then click 'add'. Choose 'HTTP' and click next. In the following window, enter madwifi.org as the Server Name and /suse/10.2 as the Directory on Server and click next. Here is a screen shot of mine:

• After it syncs up, you will need to open Software Management in the YaST Administrator Settings. In the search box, enter the text "madwifi". In the results, you should see several results. You will need to select madwifi and madwifi-kmp-default or if you do not see the latter one, choose madwifi-kmp-[the 'uname -r' of your machine]. Important Point - If madwifi was previously selected, right-click it and choose the option to update it.

That is it! After this point, I rebooted my laptop, clicked on the Network Manager applet and was able to see a number of wireless networks around me!