Getting my Atheros 5k - athk5 wifi working on Ubuntu

November 14th 2011

For the longest time my wifi (which is an Atheros ath5k) has been reported as hard blocked on Ubuntu.

There doesn't seem to be a pattern, but when it works, it works for a long time... then all of a sudden it stops again.

The fix seemed to be a rather strange one, but never mind, it works. Run this in the terminal:

Text Snippet:


sudo rmmod -f ath5k
sudo modprobe ath5k

I'm not saying this will definitely work for you, but for me at least it does.

Hope it helps someone out there!

Alifia commented on Oct 21st 2013

Thank you very much!I was going crazy over this. I've been having silamir problems in 10.10 also, I found a workaround constant pinging have kept the WiFi connection working. This fix stopped working in 11.04 :

Roger commented on Nov 16th 2013

@Alifia I'd love to say that I'm a pro at this kind of stuff, but I'm a software developer.
I actually put this on my site so that I could look at it when I next wiped my machine. Most of my articles are written for me (in case I forget something)