It has last still a while since I am annoyed about the atheros chip included in the Macbook pro. It works quite well under darwin but in Linux ... without words. What I've done is to use Gentoo/Prefix which works really well and I'd like to thank the great guys doing this work. But there a lot of things I am used to on Gentoo and I am missing on MacOS. The best solution for me was to change the WLAN miniPCIe card with the downside of not being able to use WLAN in MacOS because darwin doesn't support Intel WLAN chips. (A bit confusing to me because everything else is Intel ... but ... apple .. what should I say )

Here is the story and the HOWTO for changing the WLAN Card:

To change the WLAN Card we have to open and remove the keyboard. Therefore we have to begin on the bottom side of the notebook by removing the battery and the memory coverage.

Then you've to remove the 2 torx screws under the memory cover and two screws on the front side of the notebook which are normally covered by the battery.

Then we have to remove the screws on the backside underneath the display hinge. These are the long screws.

Now we can turn around the notebook and remove all the screws on each side of the notebook shown in the following pics.

The most sophisticated part is the removing of the keyboard itself. The whole cover is locked with snatches in the front (the side where the touch-pad resits). We have to lift the cover without damaging it I suggest to use something soft like a wedge made out of wood or similar.

ATTENTION: Do not lift the keyboard to fast! There is a cable left which connects the keyboard with the mainboard we have to remove first. That's quite simple - you've just to remove the tape and to lift (not slide - simple lift it upwards) the plug.

No we can see the WLAN Card on the left hand side. Now we've to unplug the antennas. There you should really be careful because these plugs are very sensible and they are not made for a lot of plug/unplug procedures. The best way to remove is to use a calliper and the pull the plugs straight upwards. There is on torx screw left we've to remove and then we can exchange the WLAN card!

Now reassemble the macbook in descending order Happy hacking!