I lost my wireless

[RandyRitter]

Please bare with me, I am a ubuntu novice.

I recently installed ubuntu server on a dell inspiron 830. I did this on a laptop only because it was available but everything went perfectly. As I was experimenting with some of the available packages, I suddenly realized that it was no longer recognizing my wireless card. Everything was working fine, when I was plugged in it used the wire, when not it switched to the wireless. Now, it appears to not even know there is a wireless card. One of the networking packages I installed must have corrupted something.

I suppose I could reinstall from scratch, but that wouldn't really teach me anything. The problem is I don't know where to start in trying to track down and repair this issue.

So, could I have some suggestion where to look and what to look for?

Thanks very much!

[Dark_Stang]

Go ahead and run the following commands and post the output, that will help us get some more details.

ifconfig
iwconfig

Edit: Also... uh, why did you install the server edition on a laptop? Why not the desktop edition?

[RandyRitter]

Command output:

$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:b2:69:cc
inet addr:10.110.3.20 Bcast:10.110.15.255 Mask:255.255.240.0
inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:feb2:69cc/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:14328 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:1872 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:3129127 (3.1 MB) TX bytes:388971 (388.9 KB)
Interrupt:17

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:240 (240.0 B) TX bytes:240 (240.0 B)

virbr0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr e2:32:94:90:f0:84
inet addr:192.168.122.1 Bcast:192.168.122.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::e032:94ff:fe90:f084/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:21 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:3990 (3.9 KB)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

virbr0 no wireless extensions.

pan0 no wireless extensions.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If I understand what this is saying, I gather that the OS is no longer even recognizing that there is a wireless card in the machine. How do I go about installing new hardware? Is that the correct next step?

BTW: The reason for the laptop is simply testing. I´ve played around a little bit with desktop and wanted to try out server and LAMP. The laptop was a convenient piece of hardware at the time. This is not a long term home for it. Just learning...

Thanks again for the help!

[RandyRitter]

If found the following command in help. It shows that there is a card there but that it is unclaimed. The help suggested that I use a utility to utilize a Windows driver. I downloaded the driver and the utility and installed the driver however there was no change on the results of the ifconfig or the iwconfig.

$ sudo lshw -C network

*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:0c:00.0
version: 02
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
...

Still looking.....

[Dark_Stang]

Intel cards are supported out of the box... Hm...

[RandyRitter]

Yes, I believe the Intel cards must be supported. When I first performed the install, everything worked great! Wired and wireless. Somewhere along the way one of the packages I tried out must have removed something it should not have.

How do I ask ubuntu to "re-discover" the Intel card and associate the appropriate drivers?

[RandyRitter]

I tried installing the free wireless drivers but as I got into it, they did not appear to support intel cards. Is that true?

Anyone have any ideas how I can have Ubuntu Server ¨re-discover" the hardware on my machine?