This is a guest post. The issue of wifi with atheros driver in Linux mint 14. Thank you to Sunija M Vijayan for this fix.

I tried various Wifi drivers and various methods to activate wifi in my Soni Vaio E Series Notebook. When i first tried ‘ifconfig’ it returned ’no device’… I logged into windows and found out my Adapter ( Atheros 9285)… Researched on it.. tried if I can install it manually.. but no use.. : Tried modprobe ath9k nothing happened… Then i tried rfkill rfkill got a series of commands below rfkill (Usage: rfkill [options] command Options: –version show version (0.4-1ubuntu3 (Ubuntu)) Commands: help event list [IDENTIFIER] block IDENTIFIER unblock IDENTIFIER where IDENTIFIER is the index no. of an rfkill switch or one of: all wifi wlan bluetooth uwb ultrawideband wimax wwan gps fm)

Then tried rfkill list 0: sony-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: YES Hard blocked: no 1: sony-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no

Thought I would unblock it first so read about rfkill and unblocking it

http://www.geekmind.net/2011/01/linux-wifi-operation-not-possible-due.html

rfkill unblock wifi then again tried rfkill

0: sony-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: sony-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no

Then tried modprobe ath9k

I found another post that was helpful and let me undestand more about my driver and if the kernel is supported or not.. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/atheros-ar9285-wifi-not-working-in-slackware-14-a-4175430144/ This is what i have done… :-)