Bluetooth or Not Bluetooth

I have found problem with ath9k driver for my wifi card. When bluetooth enabled I get random disconnects from AP and after some disconnects it loses AP completely and can not get ip again. If I disable bluetooth in Linux or in Windows wifi works almost ok, sometime it looses AP too and I need to reboot.

I guess you notice that on FW series laptop we have only one wireless switch for bluetooth and wifi both. You can’t just disable bluetooth by switching it on case.

Another problem is if you disable bluetooth in Windows, you can’t then enable it in Linux. I’ve enabled it in Windows then rebooted into Ubuntu and wrote two shell scripts to enable/disable bluetooth in runtime. All you should do is open your text editor (gedit maybe) and make two files named bluetooth-off and bluetooth-on then put this lines into files.

For bluetooth-off:
#!/bin/bash
sudo hciconfig hci0 down
sudo modprobe -r hci_usb


And for bluetooth-on:
#!/bin/bash
sudo modprobe hci_usb


Save this files on your desktop, or somewhere you can find it quick. Open your terminal and go where you saved files (e.g. cd ~/Desktop/). You must give this files execution permission to run it. Using this commands chmod +x bluetooth-off and the same for bluetooth-on. Or right click on file select Permissions tab and select Allow executing file as program.

Ok, that’s it, now double click on bluetooth-off/on file, select Run in terminal and you should get a terminal window asking your password, enter it and bluetooth will turn off/on.

UPD: If I’m constantly ping any server or my router it helps to hold connection too. That’s strange, but it works.

UPD2: If I lost connectio to AP and can get IP again, I can just disable wireless and enable it again from right click menu on network applet in tray. If it does not help, just do it again, it help almost time.

Stay Wireless

My laptop have Atheros AR928x wireless card installed, and it’s not work in Ubuntu by default.

Earlier, madwifi drivers was the best for Atheros cards, now madwifi not work for my card. But they have released opensource driver for new chips like AR928x and it’s named ath9k.

More information is on kernel wireless ath9k page.

You can download it here http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download

I have 2.6.24-21 kernel on Hardy at the moment, so I downloaded compat-wireless-old.tar.bz2

Then done this:
tar jxvf compat-wireless-old.tar.bz2
cd compat-wireless-2.6-old
make
sudo make install
sudo make unload
sudo make load
sudo modprobe ath9k

Now if you run iwconfig, you should get something like this:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"spongebob"

It means that driver is working and we have wireless interface. Now you can right click on network manager in tray and select your wireless network (you should disconnect ethernet first).

P.S. To compile driver, you shoud have developer packages is installed i.e. autoconf, linux-headers etc

UPD: For those who have Intel PRO Wireless 5000 card please read this comment describing how to install driver for Intel PRO Wireless 5000 and check topic on ubuntuforums.org