Sequence of events:
1. Bought Toshiba NB305 (of the -N311 persuasion, so it's the white one).
2. Arrived home and setup wireless under Windows XP and then booted into Acronis TrueImage Home 2009 to do full backup of XP partition to an external USB drive.
3. Attached LG external DVD drive.
4. Booted with Linux Mint 7 live cd. No wireless support.
5. Booted wiith Fedora 11 live cd. Wireless joy-even authenticated WPA2.
6. Booted back to Linux Mint 7 live cd to run Partition Editor (as Fedora's editor during install is atrocious).
7. Shrank XP partition and created a 13GB partition between the XP partition and the hidden system restore partition.
8. Booted back into Fedora 11 live cd and ran install to disk.
a. Created a 500MB ext3 /boot partition, because, well, I had to.
b. Created a 10GB partition in an extended partition because I ran out of partitions: 1 primary for XP; 1 primary for hidden recovery partition; 1 for /boot partition.
c. Created 2GB swap partition.
9. Rebooted after install completed.
10. Watched XP blue screen as Fedora install scrambled the XP partition (this was expected as others had reported the same thing).
11. Booted into Fedora and saw wireless working so did software updates and added the free and non-free repositories and installed VLC and flash and so forth.
12. Booted into Acronis again to restore XP.
13 Rebooted into XP - all is well again.
14. Rebooted into Fedora - no wireless. It's disabled and there's nothing I can do to get it up in the panel again:
a. Tried opening Services and bouncing Network. Nada.
b. Tried Fn+f8, including double-taps of f8. Nada.
c. Tried who knows how many other things. Wireless no esta there, hombre. No se puede.
15. Rebooted into XP so I could post this.
And there you have it. Fedora 11 is one of the few distros right now that supports the Atheros AR9285 in the Toshiba NB205 thanks to rolling on the cutting edge with a 2.6.29 kernel. However, as was reported in the Ubuntu forums, the wireless support seems to just vanish after a bit. Someone else reported actually that it was intermittent and reappeared for a time after awhile. I'm not seeing that. I just don't have wireless at all. Tomorrow I'll try plugging into the Aiport Extreme Base Station with Ethernet to see if that doesn't kick start things.
Anyone else working with a Toshiba NB205? Or any other netbook with the AR9285 chip?
Linear Mode
