Trisquel 8.0 mini recognizes ath5k as wired ethernet adapter
My wireless adapter is shown as following using lspci command. (It's actually an Atheros AR5424, though)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
In Trisquel 8.0 mini, it's recognized as "Wired 2" (whereas "Wired 1" is the true ethernet adapter) and I can't enter SSID manually. I currently have only 2 GB flash storage so the standard edition (which works on the same ath5k WLAN card) is too big. And it's not very convenient for me to append the screenshot right now. However, I can provide further details later.
Have you tried a newer kernel? Trisquel 8 ships with Linux 4.4 but you can install, from its repository, the package "linux-image-generic-hwe-8.0" to get a 4.15 image. You can have version 4.19 or even 5.3 following the instructions on https://jxself.org/linux-libre/
You need to reboot on the newly installed kernel (the newest version is the default).
I planned to make a presentation using a free/libre distribution yesterday, but with very limited hardware resources. And the situation was very embarrassing. They said that Trisquel was the stupidest operating system that even couldn't correctly detect the type of a mature NIC.
And I don't believe that this could be a kernel bug. The Atheros card in my notebook existed for more than a decade before Trisquel 8. I can't imagine that such kernel bug was (re)introduced in 4.4 and didn't get fixed until the next LTS release.
The drivers come from the kernel and it seems a logical place to start. Part of troubleshooting is trying out different things. Trying a different kernel would then help to, if nothing else, rule that out.
Update: I've reproduced the bug as shown in the picture (taken using my LineageOS phone)
