oldmanstan
December 31st, 2008, 02:08 PM
Wifi has always worked reasonably well on my thinkpad. It was working yesterday too until it mysteriously died.
Here's what happened: I was having some issues with avahi/zeroconf not working properly so I was messing around with that. It occurred to me that my laptop might not be visible to other machines (which was the problem) because it was connected over the wireless.
So, I plugged in a network cable and kept messing around with it. In order to make sure the laptop wasn't still really using the wireless I unchecked the wireless in the network manager applet.
After while I gave up and decided to go back to the wireless (the ethernet cable running across the floor needed to go) so I re-checked enable wireless in the NM and then let it start connecting to my network.
It never connected. I got a WPA passphrase box, which sometimes happens, I clicked 'ok' and let it keep going. After awhile it failed and gave up. I was confused so I tried again, no luck. Then I rebooted (which really shouldn't matter but...) and after the reboot there's no wireless in the network manager.
I had been meaning to switch to the 64 bit version anyway so I did a fresh install. Still no wireless. lspci -v shows no wireless adapter. ifconfig and iwconfig both show no wireless adapters.
Any ideas of what this could be? Maybe the wireless hardware died? That seems pretty unlikely to me, the machine is less than a year old.
machine is a thinkpad t61 with the atheros wireless chipset. this is on ubuntu 8.10. the problem first occurred on the 32 bit version and now persists with the 64 bit version.
Here's what happened: I was having some issues with avahi/zeroconf not working properly so I was messing around with that. It occurred to me that my laptop might not be visible to other machines (which was the problem) because it was connected over the wireless.
So, I plugged in a network cable and kept messing around with it. In order to make sure the laptop wasn't still really using the wireless I unchecked the wireless in the network manager applet.
After while I gave up and decided to go back to the wireless (the ethernet cable running across the floor needed to go) so I re-checked enable wireless in the NM and then let it start connecting to my network.
It never connected. I got a WPA passphrase box, which sometimes happens, I clicked 'ok' and let it keep going. After awhile it failed and gave up. I was confused so I tried again, no luck. Then I rebooted (which really shouldn't matter but...) and after the reboot there's no wireless in the network manager.
I had been meaning to switch to the 64 bit version anyway so I did a fresh install. Still no wireless. lspci -v shows no wireless adapter. ifconfig and iwconfig both show no wireless adapters.
Any ideas of what this could be? Maybe the wireless hardware died? That seems pretty unlikely to me, the machine is less than a year old.
machine is a thinkpad t61 with the atheros wireless chipset. this is on ubuntu 8.10. the problem first occurred on the 32 bit version and now persists with the 64 bit version.