Hopefully this will help people out there, trying to get wifi working on their Eee PC. I bought a 1005HA-H the other day, and its a great machine, but Ubuntu has some issues on it.

The documentation on Ubuntu’s wiki says

Tested with 9.04 NBR. Wireless (Atheros AR9285) doesn’t work out of the box. The ath9k module which is supplied by default doesn’t seem to work correctly. You have to download the backports .deb file to a usb stick and manually install it to get it working.

If you don’t live and breathe Ubuntu every day, you may have no idea what any of that means. In short, if you install the current 9.04 release of Jaunty UNR, you will need to install this backport of the modules package:

linux-backports-modules-2.6.28-11-generic_2.6.28-11.12_i386.deb

Copy it over on a USB stick, and install it with

This will get you working, so you just need to reboot to load the new driver.

If the update manager tells you to install updates, just close it for now. You need to do some things first.

First, go into Software Sources, and at least enable the “Unsupported updates” in the “Updates” tab. I personally enabled everything on the “Ubuntu Software” tab and everything but jaunty-proposed on the Updates tab. (I also hand-tweaked my sources.list to use my Internode mirror, but you don’t need to do this, usually)

Run the Update Manager, and install all your updates. Make sure you press Check to refresh the package list.

Don’t reboot!

Lastly you need to install the “linux-backports-modules-jaunty”. You should be able to do that in the Synaptic Package Manager. Personally, I’m a terminal jockey, so I did it in terminal with

This removed the old backports module package, and will ensure that the right backports package will be always installed and kept in sync with your kernel. You need the same backports modules package installed as your kernel version for wifi to work.

This is the /etc/apt/sources.list that I use for Internode’s mirror:

Seems to work well for me.