Atheros AR242x 802.11abg Wireless - not working with ubuntu 8.04

As vostro A840 comes with preinstalled ubuntu 8.04. The wifi was working properly but upgrading it to 8.10 caused me soo much trouble .. so I freshly

installed 8.04 but now the (Atheros) wifi is not at all available for me..

I have enabled the restrictive drivers.. even then it's of no use

After few googling I found that I have to make use of madwifi driver... but I just want to know is there a backport for the same atheros card..

here are few o/p

lspci

09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

 lshw -C network
  *-network UNCLAIMED   
       description: Network controller
       product: AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter
       vendor: Atheros Communications Inc.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:0c:00.0
       version: 01
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: RTL8101E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:09:00.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 02
       serial: 00:21:70:89:a2:90
       size: 100MB/s
       capacity: 1GB/s
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.2LK duplex=full ip=192.168.1.2 latency=0 link=yes module=r8169 multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=100MB/s