ok. i ran 'lspci -v -v' in terminal. i know for a fact that my bus card is atheros, so i going to show the output that i got that stated atheros.

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)
Subsystem: Actiontec Electronics Inc IBM HighRate 11 a/b/g Wireless CardBus Adapter
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 168 (2500ns min, 7000ns max), Cache Line Size: 128 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
Region 0: Memory at c4000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>



can someone tell me what i would do from here to get this driver over the another os that doesnt have the driver. plz and thank you

The key here is the vendor and device code returned by lspci -n which is used by the kernel to look for the appropriate driver. In this case I guess you want the ath_cb driver for a CardBus interface. I believe the hotplug facility is still responsible for mapping a device to a driver and doing the driver loading.

I seem to have the same device; the vendor and device code for mine is 168c:0013 -- googling for that quickly turns up Madwifi as an apparently fully supported completely open-source driver (as indeed I have found to be the case).

As for how to go the other way around, figure out that PCI device 03:00.0 is managed by lsmod module so-and-so, I really only have vague ideas. Look in /proc/bus/pci, /proc/net and so forth.

Couple of suggestions for texasone:

Instead of Linuxant, you can try ndiswrapper. Its free, and works great but a little more involved. Head over to the Ubuntu/Debian forums and you shall come to know how to do this.

i found that madwifi has the ati driver i need and the nvidia driver that i will need when i get a new card. now my question is this: can i modify the iso file on my computer before burning the disk. kinda like dreamlinux. i have tried dream linux out and i like the ability to change the iso before burning, and can i do that with debian and add things like madwifi so i dont have to bother trying to find an ethernet cord and connect it to my router. would i just add the tar.gz file to the iso file or would i have to install the drivers when the OS is completely installed?

..well, as a Debian user myself (my main OS being Solaris), I'd suggest you don't waste time trying to load Ubuntu and Debian on the same box. They're practically the same, with Ubuntu the more newbie-friendly. If you want to learn, I'd suggest you stick with one, learn it fairly well, then jump to other distributions like SuSE or RH , because then you have a better grasp of a Linux-based OS and it will be easier for you to see the differences among the distributions.

As for the atheros-based wireless card, atheros is probably the more common chipset, and should be pretty easy to make it work using ndiswrapper, using Windows drivers.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper

The install CD should contain the necessary drivers, it's another thing whether the installer discovers the devices properly and configures the system to use the correct drivers. You can nudge it in the right direction by passing in parameters to the installer but I can't really say more about that particular topic. Look for OEM instructions for the installer; they should cover this.

You might look at www.forumubuntusoftware.com for a look at a rehash of ubuntu known as ultimate edition.There are several options there to build your own distro and most of the tools you would need to do it.