wireless giving trouble in Ubuntu recently

[H.S.]

Eric Lemoine wrote:
> On 10/18/06, H.S. <hs.samix at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have noticed that in the last few days, I am not able to connect via
>> the Networking GUI to my home wireless network. This on a Dell Inspiron
>> 5160 laptop using bcm43xx kernel module on a 2.6.15 kernel. Is there
>> something wrong in the networking GUI package or some related packages?
>>   The laptop has a broadcom 1350 mini pci card:
>>   {~}> lspci | grep -i ethernet 0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller:
>> Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
>>
>> If I give a new essid and a wep key in the Networking GUI and try to
>> connect, I notice that the entries in /etc/network/interfaces are not
>> immediately updates.
>>
>> Comments about this are welcome.
> 
> Just a question : does it work if you manually configure
> /etc/network/interfaces or is the problem lying somewhere else?
> 


Here is more info (I just connected through a lan cable):

{~}> dpkg -l *bcm* | grep ^i
ii  bcm43xx-firmware  1.1-0ubuntu1     Broadcom 43xx Firmware
ii  bcm43xx-fwcutter  20060108-6build1 Utility for extracting Broadcom
43xx firmwar
{~}> lsmod | grep bcm
bcm43xx               124044  0
ieee80211softmac       29696  1 bcm43xx
ieee80211              37064  2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac


So, the wireless is neither working through manual configuration (using
iwconfig commands to set the essid, key and channel) nor by the
Networking GUI.

The wireless router PC doesn't even see any traffic at all on its
wireless interface from Ubuntu laptop!

In the networking, I also have a profile called "Home Wired" where I
left the wireless device unconfigured. Yet when I change profile to
"Home Wired", it still tries to up the wireless device. Either something
is wrong with Networking GUI (network-admin command) or I do not know
how to use it.

->HS