Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat

I installed Easy Peasy 1.0 on my Asus Eee PC 701 some weeks ago and everything was fine till today when I applied updates (I’m on Intreprid repositaries) and my wi-fi stopped working although the wi-fi LED was on. I was on the ath5k module, and it was loaded. However, some googling taught me that the ath5k should be dropped in favor of the madwifi driver (ath_pci module). However, the ath_pci module was not on my system with the kernel 2.6.27-8-eeepc and linux-restricted-modules-eeepc. An apt-file search ath_pci returned (among others) linux-restricted-modules-generic, but it was for the generic kernel and not the eeepc specific one. So I downloaded the latest stable version (0.9.4) of madwifi and tried to compile it, but there was a compilation error. I then got the trunk development version (svn checkout http://svn.madwifi-project.org/madwifi/trunk madwifi), and it worked.

But the bottom line is: ath_pci is 3 times faster than ath5k on my 701! I was simply amazed.

Note: don’t forget to blacklist ath5k (the madwifi-tools package does that automatically).