For those with wifi problems (no networks in nm-applet)

I'm running an Ubuntu 8.10 alpha 6.
My wifi worked out of the box with ath5k, but with some slowness.. Anyway it was working!
A couple of days ago, on a cold boot, I found wifi not working: interface was up, nm-applet didn't show any network and even trying to configure wifi with iwconfig, statically, wouldn't make my aao connect to the access point.
I downlloaded madwifi drivers, compiled and installed, blacklisted ath5k. No wifi!
Removed madwifi. Re-installed the kernel. NO WIFI!!!!
:evil: :evil: :evil:
Today I booted my windows partition, and wifi was working (as I expected). The funny thing is that on reboot, starting ubuntu, wifi started to work again!!!

Don't know exactly what has happened, but I suspect that wifi card firmware was messed up, and starting windows did some kind "reset" on the card itself.
Give it a try if your symptoms are similar to mines! :mrgreen:

 

I'm using kubuntu 8.04.1 and sometimes the AA1 behaves like yours: the wifi interface is up (checked using iwconfig) but it doesn't find any wi-fi network (iwlist ath0 scan -> "No scan results"). Nothing change even acting on the wifi switch or rebooting the AA1. But if I turn off the AA1 and then I turn it on, the wifi works. Infact the first time I find the wifi not responding, I reinstall the driver and even rebooting, the wifi goes on not working. At the end I turn off the AA1 and I turn it on the day after, and with my surprise the wifi was working. This thing happens another time: after a reboot the wifi didn't work (interface up but no network find), so I turn off the AA1, I waited 30 seconds and I turn it on: the wifi worked again. I was thinking too about a kind of reset of the wifi device, which maybe doesn't happen when rebooting.
Anyway the wifi stops to work not on every reboot, but sometime. Likely it's due to some operation. In example a day it happens after I uninstalled knetwork manager and I installed Wicd.

 

I saw something similar with my two Fedora Rawhide installs. Wifi (with NM) stopped working in Rawhide-1 install. Shut down the AA1 and started up the Rawhide-2 install. Same problem. Disabled NM. Still no-go. Rebooted Rawhide-2 w/o Network Manager. Still no-go. Shut down the AA1 for a few hours, came back, booted WinXP - connected right away. Rebooted into Rawhide-1 (w/ NM); it worked. FWIW, replacing the installed ath5k module with the madwifi driver has not only sped up my wifi connections, but I actually stay connected for more than 5 minutes at a time.

 

What dmesg says when wifi doesn't work like this?
I have the same problem and I really hate - because only thing that helps is shut down and wait.
The dmesg is showing this:

Code:

ath5k phy0 can't reset the hardware (-5)
phy0 failed to set freq to XXXX MHz for scan

and so on.
Does anyone have better solution than reboot?

 

My problem was solved by installing 2.8.30-020630 kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.30/

 

My problem is that my wifi doesn't go off completely, after a few hours my it drops my home wifi but can see my neighbours - like right now :evil: I'm on the E220 dongle while my ipod touch in my pocket sees the network with a strong signal. My router is a Dlink wireless N which has to runs on CH11 for wifi protected setup purposes and I did wonder whether my wifi setup is only using 11 channels in USA config rather than the 13 for Europe, I've seen this kind of glitch a few times on Windows before.