When you have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on a system with a Atheros wifi card indicated by ‘Device 0037’ when you run lspci then you have a problem that the driver shipped in 12.04 isn’t compatible with that card.

The solution is to compile the driver yourself which is pretty easy so don’t worry 😉

First make sure you install the necessary tools:

sudo apt-get install build-essentials

Download the driver(s) package:

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download/stable

Unpack it, cd into the directory and do:

sudo su
./scripts/driver-select restore
./scripts/driver-select ath9k
make clean
make
make install
reboot

You now have a proper working Atheros wifi card.

That wasn’t to hard 🙂