Another Wifi Issue

I had Hardy installed on my Acer just fine, everything was running quite well. However, I cocked up an install, was getting a bunch of messages I didn't like the look of, and so decided to reformat and go Hardy from the beginning again.

I ran through the excellent AA1 Ubuntu install guide, as I had the first time. Only problem was, this time around I couldn't get the wireless to run.

The first time I'd tried, I tried both methods in the guide (neither worked) and then installed Wicd from... somewhere. I can't recall where. All I know is that this time around, I tried doing the exact same thing, but:

1. Wicd looks different and claims not to find any wireless networks.

2. The Wifi light won't come on when I switch it.

and

3. iwconfig shows eth0 and lo, and that's it.

It's also worth pointing out that the link to the Atheros driver is now broken, so I was unable to install the drivers that way (and madwifi didn't work, so I unloaded it).

Any ideas at all? I'm getting extremely frustrated with this all now. Let me know what other info I can give you.

 

Hard to tell what's gone wrong with your install tbh. You could try undoing everything you've done while trying to get wireless running - and then give it another go being really careful not to miss any of the steps. Could be worth a shot.

Another solution would be to install one of the custom built kernels people have posted links to. Pretty sure they all have the wireless support built in .

Or you could upgrade to Intrepid - a lot easier to get wireless running there... that is unless there's some special reason you're sticking with Hardy ofc.

 

I had issues with the wifi card too. Not like your but it would occasionally stop working but still reported full strength. I would have turn to off wireless networking and then turn it again to get it working, Fyi, Ubuntu 8.10. I tried ndiswrapper, madwifi and the backport, they all had issues. Even Vista had issues.

I ended up ditching the card for an intel 3945. The drivers are included in the stock ubuntu kernel and works well with Vista. Even on the lowest power setting, It seem to have better performance then the Atheros card. On high power the thing seems to be a pig though.

Anyone wanting to switch it on Vista be sure to completely remove the old Atheros driver before installing the card. I had a horrible with lockups before I could even get to the point of installing the driver. After some save mode clean up, all is grand.

 

Replacing the card's a non-starter for me. I could try Intrepid... I'll take a look at these new kernels. Although first I need to understand at what stage I install them... !

 

I use the Madwifi of 4/12 without much problems. Only at my girlfriends place I seem to loose connection from time to time, but I only found that out when trying to download a 4h stream. The access point gives me another ip, otherwise I maybe I wouldn't even have noticed at all.
The ath5k I used for a couple of days gave the same problem you have. Maybe switching to latest madwifi might help, but check not to forget something. I guess that are a lot of the problems, but hard to find out when not working on the computer.