If you have a laptop which has a Atheros 9285 wireless card you will need the following to make it work with Ubuntu Lucid:

lspci -v | less

This will tell you what the the wireless chipset is.

Download

You can download the driver at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download/stable/. These are stable releases, so choose the most recent version unless you have a compelling reason not to do so.

Step 2: Unpack

	Run these commands in a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal):

	This assumes you have downloaded the 2.6.30 driver onto the Desktop. Change the commands below for your circumstances.

		cd Desktop
		tar -xf compat-wireless-2.6.30.tar.bz2
		cd compat-wireless-2.6.30
		make
		sudo make install
		sudo make unload
	
Inside drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath9k you will find the following files:
		ath9k.ko    ath9k_common.ko     ath9k_hw.ko

Type sudo modprobe ath9k

This will pick up the ath9k network driver, you should see a wireless network icon appear in the top right of the toolbar.

So this new drive is present the next time you reboot type:
	
sudo update-grub2

Then do a su - 

vi /etc/modules

Type ath9k on new line.  Save the file, and reboot.

Avoid ndiswrapper as this will reduce the performance of the network card.

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Update - if you are issues with Ubuntu 10:10, with wireless dropping, and dns issues - install the wireless backport - for maverick:
 
    sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-maverick-generic