Bill,

Re:

 > ... does anybody have Ad-hoc wifi working with an Acer Aspire One, or another
 > machine with a  AR242/AR5007 chipset?

I just got wifi working on my HP Pavillion 9715 which has the AR242/AR5007 chipset.

After a lot of reading I found that this chipset does not work with the ath_pci
kernel module.  You have to use the ath_hal kernel mod.

Once I compiled and installed ath_hal, I rebooted and got it to work.

I'm using Fedora 9, but the linux o/s shouldn't matter.

Once the kernel module is working, you should be able to
use iwconfig and see something like:

/sbin/iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wifi0     no wireless extensions.

ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"n7zgr-3"  Nickname:"turion"
           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated
           Bit Rate:36 Mb/s   Tx-Power:16 dBm   Sensitivity=1/1
           Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
           Power Management:off
           Link Quality=34/70  Signal level=-62 dBm  Noise level=-96 dBm
           Rx invalid nwid:521417  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
           Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

pan0      no wireless extensions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

I then set a static IP with:

sudo /sbin/ifconfig ath0 inet 192.168.0.89 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

in /etc/modprobe.d

I have the file blacklist-ath5k

> # This file is part of the madwifi package from livna/rpmfusion
> # You have to consider using ath_pci only if ath5k.ko
> # from newer kernel do not work with your hardware.
> #
> # In this case you have to swich this comment line:
> # ( comment also the  madwifi file  in the same directory).
> blacklist ath5k
> #blacklist ath_pci
--------------------------------------------------------------------

the command below shows that I have both ath_hal and ath_pci

dmesg -l | grep ath

ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
MadWifi: ath_attach: Switching rfkill capability off.
ath_pci: wifi0: Atheros 5424/2424: mem=0xf6000000, irq=19
device-mapper: multipath: version 1.0.5 loaded
ath0: no IPv6 routers present

I played around with ath5k and ath_pci with no working wifi.
After I loaded ath_hal, wifi works.

-= Jim =-

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