I was using Ubuntu 6.10 on my notebook happily for the last few months. I only use this computer when I go on a trip and am getting it ready to go for some trips over the next month and a half. There is a newer version of Ubuntu out, 7.04. When I fired up my computer the other day, it asked if I wanted to upgrade to the newer version. Newer is better, right?
I am not sure what good things should have been loaded with the upgrade, but it at least broke my wireless. My computer did not even see my Linksys WPC11 card at all after the upgrade. Well, that is not entirely true. It knew that I stuck something in the PCMCIA slot, but not what it was or anything.
Trolling through the Ubuntu forums, I found a thread that currently is 34 pages long with people trying to get and give help on getting wireless to work in the new Ubuntu. Actually, it is not so new. It has been out for over 2 months.
By reading through this thread, the best I have found so far is to comment out the two lines in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist that read:
blacklist r818x
blacklist r8187
In my blacklist file, they were the last 2 lines. Now the machine can see my card, but I am still not able to connect automatically like before. I have been able to connect however. Someone said that you need to put an “x” at the end of the wireless SSID name for it to work. It worked for me without this.
It seems to me that something that has drawn this much attention should be addressed by the Ubuntu team. It was working before, what caused them to have to break it?
I am sticking to Slackware on my main box. I did try Slack on my notebook, but sadly, could not get wireless working at all. Ubuntu 6.10 worked out of the box. I might downgrade back to 6.10 if I cannot get this working right.