A Ubuntu Wireless Question

[Occulus]

I have a friend who has a HP Pavilion dv6000 laptop computer with Atheros wireless hardware (AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter). He's running Ubuntu 9.10 as of now, and has at one time has a working wireless connection (I don't know which release he was using when it was working, but it was prior to 9.10). Since then, he has moved and used the ethernet port instead until now, which always works perfectly. He wants to once again untether himself from the wires, and it just. Wont. Work.

He very recently updated his system to 9.10 (2.6.31-17-generic) and now cannot get Ubuntu to activate the wireless hardware. I did a 'lshw -C network' and Ubuntu knows the hardware is there (it even reports that the driver is ath5k, which I think is the right one), but "enable wireless" is grayed out in the network tray icon (for lack of a better term) and issuing a wakeup command (the syntax escapes me at the moment) returned an error=132 or some such. I'm being vague because I don't have the laptop in front of me and don't have a setup with which to both test and fix the problem.

What I'm asking for is suggestions. I've Googled this to hell and gone, and although many people seem to be having this issue with Ubuntu 9.10 all over various forums, there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut fix for it. I'm hoping someone here has some ideas as to what to try.

I'll be revisiting the issue on Tuesday, and I think I'll ask him to bring all his equipment over so I can try to more efficiently resolve the issue. I'll be able to update the situation then. Until that time, please, if you have any idea on what to try, post. The more suggestions, the better.

[CK_John]

1. Cross post in open source forum

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=240>

[pokerfan]

2. Has he tried the Ubuntu forums?

Specifically, the http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=336">Networking & Wireless group.

[Occulus]

3. I told him to go there and ask

To be fair, though, there are a lot of posts saying that there's a problem with wireless in Ubuntu when upgrading to 9.10, and not a whole lot of solutions. I'm hoping someone here has an idea.

This one has me stumped; I think it's a Ubuntu bug. I can almost always fix these kinds of things by Googling and reading forums for a while. On the other hand, I don't use wireless connections at all (except for opening an SSH connection to my iPod), so I don't really have the experience I need to solve this issue by myself.

[RoyGBiv]

4. Question ...

When you say he updated, did he have a working Ubuntu installation and then used the internal update mechanism to upgrade to 9.10? If so, working installation went, that could be a source of the problem. Depending on how far back the working installation goes, it could make unraveling what happened quite complex.

Extremely generic advice:

That said, most of these driver issues boil down to a couple things. Assuming the driver actually exists on the system, the driver may not be compiled against the current kernel and thus is failing to load. Or, if it is there and is correct for the current kernel version, either some other driver is being loaded that interferes with it, or the driver itself is being blocked by some configuration file. The system calls it but then doesn't actually load it. The latter often happens when the packager (Ubuntu) changes the configuration of the driver to be used, blocking the old one from loading, or they do this in testing and forget to change it back before release. It's easy to do when you're dealing with a billion drivers of various sorts, most of which the hardware manufacturer doesn't support and sometimes tries actively to prevent from working properly.

The lsmod command can tell you what modules are actually loaded. You can pipe that through grep of course to search for specific things. I'd first check to see if the ath5k is actually being loaded, then go from there. (If it *is* loaded and isn't working, there's another problem than this.)

Anyway, when you're searching for an answer, look for potential solutions that mention these things. You'll probably need to check the modprobe configuration.