Why does 18.04 not detect WiFi devices that 16.04 detects

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 13:58, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:

> Personal denigrations help no-one.

It's an observation not a denigration. However, thank you for replying
and falsifying it!

> As it happens, today, after coming back to the computer, after being
> away (with my cellphone, that I use as a wifi hotspot for the
> computers that have wifi, to access the Internet) for a couple of
> hours, the network manager (I assume that it is the network manager),
> or, otherwise, the icon in the panel, that shows the signal strength
> for  wifi connections, and, the ethernet/wifi connection status, upon
> being clicked, displayed the available wifi connection devices.
>
> Then, a few minutes later, it did not, again, showing just my cellphone.
>
> Then, a few minutes later, it again displayed all the available wifi
> connection devices.

So, it's an intermittent problem.

What you describe sounds a little to me like a poorly or
intermittently connected wifi antenna. When the connection fails, it
can pick up a very close signal -- the phone -- but not distant ones.

If this is the case, then trying other distro versions -- not
installing, just booting -- will help to verify it.

> Oh, and, the reason that I had not gone into the BIOS/UEFI, or, booted
> using a 16.04 iso image (all Ubuntu iso image discs, are LIVE, are
> they not?), is due to having wanted to preserve the system state (open
> web browser windows, etc), unless I absolutely needed to reboot (like
> for a security update involving kernel upgrades).

Bookmark your tabs. Maybe use a browser-sync tool to make sure you can
access them on another machine. You can even hibernate Ubuntu, if you
have that enabled, to reboot and get into the BIOS.

(If it's not enabled, then enable it.)

However, booting a live medium will access your swap partition where
the hibernated image is stored, so don't boot a live image on a
hibernated system unless you don't mind losing the saved state. It
shouldn't harm the install at all.

-- 
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