I've been having a strange issue with the wireless network connection on
my laptop. As you can tell from some of my recent posts, I recently
switched my laptop to Ubuntu from Windows. The primary problem that
stimulated the move was that I could not get my wireless card to stay
connected to our home network, or any network for that matter. It had
been working for about 10 months with no problems before this, and all
of a sudden it crapped out. I tried reinstalling the driver, and
nothing seemed to fix the problem.
So I switched to Ubuntu, and it worked... for a while. Now I'm having
similar problems again. If I reboot the machine, it will connect to my
home router (using WEP). After a while (could be 5 minutes, could be 2
hours) it will lose the connection, and I won't be able to get it to
connect to any network (not even any of my neighbors unencrypted
routers) unless I reboot the computer (shutdown, power on because Ubuntu
won't reboot for some reason, a whole other problem altogether).
Something interesting to me is that I can still use iwlist to see the
access points in the area, including the one that I want to connect to.
Here is that iwconfig returns when the connection is working:
eth0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"BETA"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: 00:09:5B:E9:90:A8
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=100/100 Signal level=-35 dBm Noise level=-88 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
And when it's not:
eth0 unassociated ESSID:"BETA"
Mode:Managed Channel=0 Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
Bit Rate=0 kb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
So, any ideas of what the problem could be? My suspicion is
hardware failure only because I was having similar problems before in
Windows. Is there any way to test if this is the problem? The computer
is still under warranty from Best Buy, so I could take it to them, but I
suspect they'll say, "Linux, what?" and attribute the problem to that
and be done with it. Any advice or experience here?
Thanks,
Randy Barlow who's sorry for the high volume of posts to the list he's
made lately
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