Hi all,

Long-time reader, first-time poster here. I'm having a bit of trouble with my wireless, and am hoping someone out there could possibly help.

This is all very similar to this thread, but I've tried the fix suggested with no results.

My situation:

I'm running Xubuntu 8.04 (auto-updated from 7.10 back in April) with its built-in Lucent/Agere (8.1 firmware) wireless card. It worked fine until about a week ago, when after a reboot, it would no longer give me an IP.

a) Orinoco drivers are loaded (orinoco, orinoco_cs, hermes, psmcia and pcmcia_core)

b) Potential conflicting drivers (prism*, hostap) are neither blacklisted nor loaded (lsmod | grep prism; lsmod | grep host) give no results.

c) ifconfig shows the interface eth1 with correct MAC address but no IP address. It also shows eth0 (wired internet) with an IP from the same router, and two Avahi addresses.

d) When I start up, iwconfig shows the interface eth1 with a blank ESSID and correct MAC address for the access point. I can set essid (sudo iwconfig essid Blahblah) to my hidden ESSID, and iwconfig then shows the right ESSID.

e) sudo iwlist eth1 scan reports no results

f) I'm not using any encryption on the router or the laptop.

g) dhclient fails to get an IP address ("No DHCPOFFERS received.")

h) I tried static IP but didn't work either.

i) ping 192.168.0.1 doesn't get a response from the access point.

j) I can convince the gnome nmapplet (nm-editor?) that it's connected at 87% strength, but iwconfig never reports an association with an access point.

k) I've tried the following options to the kernel loading: noapic nolapic acpi=off apm=on. It didn't solve the problem.

Results from lshw -C network are:
Code:
  *-network               
       description: Ethernet interface
       product: 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: a
       bus info: pci@0000:00:0a.0
       logical name: eth0
       version: 0d
       serial: 00:00:39:85:c8:f1
       size: 100MB/s
       capacity: 100MB/s
       width: 32 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=e100 driverversion=3.5.23-k4-NAPI duplex=full firmware=N/A ip=192.168.0.4 latency=64 link=yes maxlatency=56 mingnt=8 module=e100 multicast=yes port=MII speed=100MB/s
  *-network
       description: Wireless LAN Card
       product: Version 01.01
       vendor: TOSHIBA
       physical id: 0
       slot: Socket 0
       resources: irq:11
  *-network
       description: Wireless interface
       physical id: 2
       logical name: eth1
       serial: 00:02:2d:56:ba:01
       capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=orinoco driverversion=0.15 firmware=Lucent/Agere 8.10 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11b
And finally (as per the suggestion in the thread linked above), the results of cat /proc/interrupts show a bunch of stuff sharing IRQ11:

Code:
           CPU0       
  0:    1304813    XT-PIC-XT        timer
  1:      17936    XT-PIC-XT        i8042
  2:          0    XT-PIC-XT        cascade
  3:        192    XT-PIC-XT      
  4:          1    XT-PIC-XT      
  5:          1    XT-PIC-XT      
  7:          1    XT-PIC-XT      
  8:          3    XT-PIC-XT        rtc
  9:        574    XT-PIC-XT        acpi
 10:          1    XT-PIC-XT      
 11:     143415    XT-PIC-XT        ohci_hcd:usb1, ohci_hcd:usb2, yenta, yenta, eth0, ALI 5451, pcmcia0.0
 12:        119    XT-PIC-XT        i8042
 14:      55989    XT-PIC-XT        ide0
But adding "exclude irq 11" (and/or exclude irq 3, just for fun) has no effect on the interrupts used.

Finally, I have a workaround: plug in my Microsoft Wireless card, which uses the Orinoco drivers, and I get internet (on eth2). (This card also shows up as two entries in lshw -C network...)

My eternal gratitude to anyone who has any ideas... I'm completely stumped!

- elistar