I have a test N USB dongle from ThinkPenguin and after I made the drivers and
replaced the two .fw files in /lib/firmware, I rebooted (to be safe I guess)
and made sure the AR9271 device was plugged in.
The firmware has been working very well in Ubuntu 12.04.2 and the connection
speeds have been the same if not a little peppier than the firmware that
comes with Ubuntu. I'm running the 3.5 kernel from the lts-quantal so maybe
that helps.
Here is what my lsusb says:
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0cf3:9271 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR9271 802.11n
