How do I get Wireless to work on a Asus Zenbook UX31(E)?

Question

I have a new Asus Zenbook UX31E. One instant problem that I have run into is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get wifi working out of the box using an Ubuntu 11.10 Live USB stick which has kernel 3.0.00-12 (it does work when I try with Fedora 16 and with OpenSuse 12.1).

Here is some relevant output:

nm-tool

NetworkManager Tool

State: disconnected

- Device: wlan0 ----------------------------------------------------------------
  Type:              802.11 WiFi
  Driver:            ath9k
  State:             unavailable
  Default:           no
  HW Address:        01:08:CA:87:2F:D5

  Capabilities:

  Wireless Properties
    WEP Encryption:  yes
    WPA Encryption:  yes
    WPA2 Encryption: yes

  Wireless Access Points

lshw -C network

  *-network DISABLED
       description: Wireless interface
       product: AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter
       vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
       logical name: wlan0
       version: 01
       serial: 01:08:ca:87:2f:d5
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list rom ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.0.0-12-generic firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
       resources: irq:17 memory:dea00000-dea7ffff memory:dea80000-dea8ffff

rfkill list

0: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
1: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
2: asus-bluetooth: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
3: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

iwconfig

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=0 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

lsmod | grep ath9

ath9k                 112711  0 
mac80211              272785  1 ath9k
ath9k_common           13599  1 ath9k
ath9k_hw              293893  2 ath9k,ath9k_common
ath                    19387  2 ath9k,ath9k_hw
cfg80211              172392  3 ath9k,mac80211,ath

The problem is that ethernet isn't working either (the laptop uses a special adapter), so instruction on how to fix this will likely involve putting .deb packages on USB sticks.

Answer 1

Upgrading the kernel to a newer version solves the problem.

In my case I downloaded a set of .deb packages from here: http://people.canonical.com/~ogasawara/eugeni/rc6/amd64/

This kernel is patched for the Zenbook and works very well for me. Together with the instructions on this Wiki page, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbook, for a script to run before the suspend function, this makes for a fully functional system for me.