How to Install Atheros AR8161 Ethernet Controller on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal)

Today I had a hard time to install Atheros AR8161 Ethernet Controller on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal). Below I will give you a fast guiding how I did.

First a few words about some common network commands that will help you along the way.

• lspci - list all PCI devices
• lshw - list hardware
• lsmod — program to show the status of modules in the Linux Kernel
• modinfo — program to show information about a Linux Kernel module
• modprobe — program to add and remove modules from the Linux Kernel

For more detailed information, please use the man command, e.g. man lspci.

And here are a few examples of running the above commands.

$ sudo lspci -vv | grep Ethernet
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 08)

Now how to solve your network problem. Whenever you have problem always try to solve it by reading the official vendor pages. I know I do the same thing ask google and millions of answer turns up, but not all of them are good. For me, I first tried to install the drivers from compat-wireless, because I was to lazy to install each official ubuntu packages and they turned up to be quite buggy. So always use official stuff, before going into more experimental things.

So lets do it the official way and that is to use http://askubuntu.com. And here the answer comes up http://askubuntu.com/questions/217361/how-do-i-install-drivers-for-the-atheros-ar8161-ethernet-controller-on-64-bit-12. AND PLEASE USE ANSWER 1, the other will lead you astray.