How well do Atheros wifi cards work in Linux?

I have used my Intel 4965 Wifi card in both Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu and have been pleased with its performance. It has been easy to set up(if even required) and works perfectly. What about Atheros cards? I have read that they released an opensource driver and there is some kind of driver/utility called Madwifi. Is using/configuring an Atheros card still a hack in Linux or does it work just as well as the Intel cards?

 

They're not as good as the intel cards in my experience, but you can tweak the driver a bit if it drops a lot. The 802.11g cards that use ath5k are a bit less hairy than the N cards using ath9k. I use ath9k and it's required some tweaking to get it right, but it works fine, just not as good as the intel card in my main lappy.

Edit: BTW if you're on Debian... here's how to get madwifi on the stock kernel.

I use a custom kernel tho and I very much recommend going that route instead.

 

ALLurGroceries,

Do you also have some experience to compare Intel vs Atheros wifi cards under Windows?

Is it the stability which is the issue with Atheros cards under Linux? Can you also compare say, the connectivity at long distances.

I have a spare Atheros card, which promises to be more powerful and sensitive than Intel, but I did not have time to replace my Intel card and check if Atheros would function any better.

 

The Atheros AR5B91 card in my N10J still isn't as good as the Intel 4965AGN in my G50V in Windows, but the Windows driver is less flaky. I don't have many problems with the Atheros card, it's just weaker, but some people seem to have issues with it under Linux (using ath9k). I think it all depends on the antennas when it comes down to it, they are much smaller in my N10 (10" LCD) versus my G50 (15")

 

I think Jaunty is giving a lot of people headaches for wifi, Atheros or otherwise. I found Intrepid had much more stable wifi performance.

 

Thanks. The reason I ask is that a lot of the Thinkpads have them and many people say that Atheros cards have better reception than the Intel ones. I was looking to purchase a preconfigured machine, but one of the things holding me back was that it had the "Thinkpad" aka Atheros, wifi card. So from what you say it sounds like sticking with Intel would be the best bet. I was hoping that the recent cooperation of Atheros with the open source community would improve things greatly, guess I was wrong.

 

The atheros driver is definitely getting better, I didn't mean to imply that it was bad, but it's not ready for prime time in my opinion... it's functional, it works most of the time, but it definitely has some quirks and occasional problems.

 

Thanks. Then I will try to stay with the Intel ones if I can, which is what my assumption was from the beginning.

 

Well it depends on your needs for me an atheros wifi card is more powerful and easy to use under linux .

 

You are using ath5k on ur card, I am specifically talking about ath9k. ath5k is way more robust at the moment

 

I've never had any problems with Atheros cards... and the driver support has always been there, either through MadWiFi or the ath5k driver; both have always worked for me. MadWifi has been around before Intel wireless cards really became mainstream, so I would argue that Atheros has been better supported under Linux in the early days. Recently, I installed the ath5k driver via the CLI, and everything went smoothly.

 

Yeh ath5k works fine(a/b/g cards), ath9k(a/b/g/n) is a bit of a different story. Nobody is buying notebooks with a/b/g/ cards anymore...

 

Oh, I see. I have no experience using a/b/g/n cards with Linux or any OS for that matter.

 

ath9k had some problems early on, but it's been working well for me for several months now.

 

I stay up to date with the latest kernel rc; ath9k has definitely made some progress but I have to keep tweaking net/mac80211/mlme.c to get it to stop disassociating when there is plenty of signal. For example if I leave it on my desk after using it and come back, sometimes the connection will have dropped. So that's where tweaking mlme.c comes in, at least it works.

 

If you're using NetworkManager, that's a major culprit in random disconnects. I hacked my NM to fix that, and then removed it entirely and now just use wicd.

 

Yeah, thanks. If I'm not mistaken that's a WPA specific problem interaction with NM, I am on a wide open network most of the time... anyways it happens when I'm manually connected too, so I'm pretty sure it's a problem in ath9k itself.

Edit: Also I have a weak antenna (as I've previously mentioned) so it's probably due to that too, but anyways I just tweak mlme.c (MONITORING_INTERVAL is the most important one) and it works.