Touble getting ath5k wifi working on Ubuntu 11.10

[Nils Kassube]

Jan Mostert wrote:
> Did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.10 just to be sure it's not
> something I've messed up.
> First time it booted into Unity, it could see the wireless networks,
> but just wouldn't connect, rebooted, now there's no wireless
> connections to connect to.
> 
> Reinstalled the non-free drivers with
> sudo apt-get install linux-firmware-nonfree
> and still nothing to connect to.

The command

dmesg

should reveal if there is a problem loading the firmware to the wireless 
card. Or you could have a look at the file "/var/log/syslog".

> iwconfig:
> 
> lo        no wireless extensions.
> 
> eth0      no wireless extensions.
> 
> wlan0     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:off/any
>           Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20
> dBm Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off Power
> Management:off

You could try the command

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

to check if you can see wireless networks. IIRC, I once had a situation 
where network-manager didn't show my AP before I used that command. But 
I prefer to use wicd instead of network-manager. Maybe you could try 
wicd as well. If you do that, please uninstall network-manager because 
otherwise both wicd and nm want to handle the wireless network and both 
will fail.


Nils