Ubuntu Hardy Heron and wifi connectivity

[Chris]

Anyone else use Ubuntu here?

I'm having a nightmare getting wireless to work on Hardy Heron. It's stupid shit like this that will keep linux in the minority. How they managed to upgrade Ubuntu and break wifi in the process is beyond me.

Anyway, don't suppose anyone's got it working? I tried replacing the wireless connection software but that didn't work.

[Stripey]

Anyone else use Ubuntu here?

I'm having a nightmare getting wireless to work on Hardy Heron. It's stupid shit like this that will keep linux in the minority. How they managed to upgrade Ubuntu and break wifi in the process is beyond me.

Anyway, don't suppose anyone's got it working? I tried replacing the wireless connection software but that didn't work.

is the driver recognising your wifi card and is the interface showing up in ifconfig?

[Chris]

is the driver recognising your wifi card and is the interface showing up in ifconfig?

Fuck knows.

Ubuntu's own wireless software says it connects but I can't access anything. The other wireless software I downloaded doesn't connect at all.

I am a linux n00b, hence using Ubuntu as I'd heard it was now at a level where it would work out of the box with minimum hassle. Obviously I was mistaken.

I've downloaded updated drivers for the wireless card but have no idea how to install the fuckers.

Glad I kept a windows install...

[Stripey]

open a terminal, as root type: ifconfig -a

it should show all the network interfaces, usually eth0 and lo0 which are your wired network card and loopback interfaces, then the wireless interface, which might show up as something like eth1 in the case of my intel integrated wireless card in my laptop, or ath0, ra0 or wlan0 depending on the chipset in your card. If only eth0 and lo0 show up then the driver isn't working. If there's a third interface then the driver works but the configuration is wrong.

which wireless card do you have? Some of the newer chipsets can be a pain in the ass to get working.

[Neil]

And this is why Linux adoption is so poor. Driver support is rubbish. I don't know how many hours of my life I've wasted trying to get network, sound, video and capture cards working with various Linux distros.

[Chris]

And this is why Linux adoption is so poor. Driver support is rubbish. I don't know how many hours of my life I've wasted trying to get network, sound, video and capture cards working with various Linux distros.

Agreed, ubuntu is supposed to be different though. Bloody pain.

Liked the last version but it was 64 bit that I was using and I got fed up with not having a flash player so thought I'd upgrade to hardy heron and go back to 32 bit.

anyway running on a wired connection while I do this now.

ifconfig has came up with the following:

wlan0

wlan0:avahi

wmaster0

[Stripey]

And this is why Linux adoption is so poor. Driver support is rubbish. I don't know how many hours of my life I've wasted trying to get network, sound, video and capture cards working with various Linux distros.

Pretty much true, it's still not anything close to being an acceptable install and go OS for the general public. Having said that, I just installed slackware 12.1 on my laptop and the wifi/ethernet/sound worked out of the box and I was in X and watching videos on youtube with firefox within 5 mins of the install finishing...Ubuntu is definately overrated.

[Chris]

I've got a RaLink 2561 according to the hardware manager BTW

[Stripey]

Agreed, ubuntu is supposed to be different though. Bloody pain.

Liked the last version but it was 64 bit that I was using and I got fed up with not having a flash player so thought I'd upgrade to hardy heron and go back to 32 bit.

anyway running on a wired connection while I do this now.

ifconfig has came up with the following:

wlan0

wlan0:avahi

wmaster0

right, well your driver is working, so it's the configuration that's the problem. Is it associating with the AP? If you look at your routers admin panel it should list associated devices...

[Stripey]

if you can, post the output of ifconfig wlan0 and also iwconfig wlan0 (highlight the text with the mouse and use shift-ins to paste into the browser)

[Chris]

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:19:db:09:83:fd

UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:11 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:158 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:1301 (1.2 KB) TX bytes:26059 (25.4 KB)

wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"SKY02011"

Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462 GHz Access Point: 00:1B:2F:A8:37:74

Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm

Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B

Link Quality=54/100 Signal level=-34 dBm

Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0

Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

[Stripey]

looks like it's associated, but the interface isn't up. As root in a terminal type ifconfig eth0 and then route -n

this will show you the IP of the wired interface and the IP of your router if you dont already know it. assuming your routers IP is 192.168.1.254 :

ifconfig eth0 down

ifconfig wlan0 up 192.168.1.50 (or the same ip your wired interface is using for convenience)

route add default gw 192.168.1.254 (or whatever your routers IP is)

in a terminal as root, that will disable the wired interface, bring up the wireless interface and set up the correct route. If that doesn't work

ifconfig wlan0 down

ifconfig eth0 up 192.168.1.50 (or whatever the IP was before)

route add default gw 192.168.1.254 ( or whatever your routers IP is)

will bring the wired interface back up

[Chris]

I'll give that a go in a min, then I'm going to bed.

I have managed to get it to connect by specifying a static IP address on the network and manually inputing the DNS servers. But the connection is being refused if I try to browse to the router admin panel and I can't get out to the net. Strange.

Anyway I'll give what you wrote a try then I'll leave it until tomorrow night.

[Stripey]

basically you have to have one or the other interfaces up, it will be defaulting to using the wired interface most likely. bringing it down then bring up the wlan0 interface with ifconfig, and then setting the default route should do the trick.

[Guest Neutral]

I prefer bsd although there are more drivers for linux

[Chris]

I just want something that's quick to start up and quick to shut down that I can surf the net and do boring stuff like word processing or programming. Linux seems great for that.

For all the fun stuff I'll be using windows.

Like I said, previous version was great but it seems loads of people are having wifi problems with hardy heron. Poor show. At least I'm a geek and so don't mind all this faffing around so much. A normal user would really struggle with this.

[spellchecker]

my honest advice if you want to try linux: buy an imac or powerbook and a copy of Vmware. I ran that combo at my last job and had 64bit ubuntu installed no problem.

ok so if you don't want an imac that may be a bit of an expensive solution. but on the upside you get a mac and osx.

if you really want to learn about linux then just buy a VPS from someone like vpslink. anything useful you'd want to learn from linux you do from the command line.

[Neil]

Or even just install Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx) on Windows and install Linux using that.

[Chris]

but on the upside you get a mac and osx.

.

That's an upside?

Don't want a mac. Really, really, really don't want a mac. Hate it when people suggest in a thread that shouldn't have macs anywhere near it that I should buy a mac.

I had 64 bit ubuntu installed fine before with no problems on my windows laptop. It's not the machine that's the issue, it's the new version of ubuntu and it's shite wifi support.

[Chris]

Or even just install Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx) on Windows and install Linux using that.

But then I'd have to wait for windows to boot after switching on my laptop, then start up the linux virtualisation. Kind of defeats the purpose.

I want to boot from startup into Linux or windows depending on what I'm planning to do at the time. I have this setup nicely now, except for the wifi. That is the route I want to go down. No macs, no virtual PCs.

[spellchecker]

re the mac issue, i was just commenting on the similarity between macs and linux at the kernel level. i recently had to use one for a job after never using one before and couldn't help but appreciate a lot about it. just opinion.

i guess another option is to downgrade ubuntu. hardy heron was notoriously bad for a lot of things, i think it may even have broken my wifi at the application level, so i simply went back to xfce and editing the wpa_supplicant configuration by hand. not pretty but meh.

[Le Stu]

You can apparently use Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6 and it does the same job for free.

[Chris]

i guess another option is to downgrade ubuntu. hardy heron was notoriously bad for a lot of things, i think it may even have broken my wifi at the application level, so i simply went back to xfce and editing the wpa_supplicant configuration by hand. not pretty but meh.

That is an option, might still have a CD I burned the old version on somewhere. Don't really want to let it defeat me though.

[spellchecker]

are you using kde or gnome?

on a console you could always try running dhcp manually

i.e. dhcpcd wlan0

or something like that. just type dhcp on a command line and then press tab for autocomplete to see what dhcp programs are installed

[Chris]

are you using kde or gnome?

Fuck knows. Whichever one Ubuntu runs as default.