Yes, you can install ubuntu alpha 6

Hi there, first post. Just to tell you I am currently running ubuntu 8.10 alpha 6. Everything worked fine except for the wireless card, but the hardy guide using the madwifi drivers works ok. I installed it with unetbootin -the new one. The installation was smooth, just like if it was hardy. There are many guides out there to install ubuntu, just stick with the unetbootin and the comunity faq to install wireless and you'll be fine. Good luck!

 

It looks like the ath5k driver is working on and off with the different kernel releases. It currently works with the latest kernel update, but did not work with the previous version.

 

I've been using it without issue on a different laptop with the same card--probably since the second 2.6.27 Ubuntu kernel and probably the first 2.6.27 Fedora kernel. (My memory's a bit hazy by now.) It's worked well for me. However--some folks on these forums have mentioned that though it worked for them, they got noticeably better performance if they continued to use the MadWifi drivers instead. YMMV. (Your Mileage May Vary).

 

Wifi is definitely slower with ath5k and 2.6.27 than it was in Hardy using madwifi. Most downloads are around 50-100 K/sec and they were often close to 900K/sec before. However, Intrepid's wifi is %100 rock solid reliable for me: no weird problems associating with the AP and no randomly dropped connections. I hope the ubuntu devs don't change anything in the final version. btw, Madwifi has never worked reliably for me neither on my AAO nor on my MacBook. Madwifi always has intermittent problems connecting(i.e. it takes a bunch of tries) and mysteriously stops working w/o any errors; the link just looks like it's up but pinging the router shows %100 packet loss. ndiswrapper was a little better but didn't survive suspend/resume on my system. As scottro said, YMMV--probably because lots of AAO have different wifi/audio chipsets.

 

I didn't look too much into it, but now that I think about it I was having some slow downs doing updates over the wireless, although I was also experiencing slow downs over the wired too last night (downloading at around 11k/s)

 

I have had no problems with speed on wireless. Maybe it's your connection or a different problem.

 

Maybe. I've decided to downgrade to 8.04 until 8.10 becomes a real release.

 

Maybe. I've decided to downgrade to 8.04 until 8.10 becomes a real release.[/quote]

The final release is out! Late news, i know... by the way, wireless doesn't work out of the box, but it is very simple to enable it!