Wireless wont connect after Ubuntu updates

[evanh]

Hello everyone!
Trying to get Ubuntu going on my Dell Inspiron


Here is what happened:
Installed Ubuntu 9.10 (via windows)
Connected to wireless and set home router as auto/default (internet works)
Installed large Ubuntu update package
Restarted and wireless is disabled (ATT uverse w/ 2wire 3800HGV-B router)

Wireless now consistently works with Vista and not Ubuntu ("wireless disabled")

Thanks so much for any help
Would really love getting off of vista for good!

-e

[reed9]

Can you post the output of

lshw -C network
lsmod
dmesg

dmesg will be quite long, you might want to redirect it to a text file first to easier copy and paste.

dmesg > dmesg.txt

will create a text file, dmesg.txt, in your current working directory.

Also, use code tags.

[Route]

I'm running Kbuntu Karmic on my inspiron e1505, converted from XP.

There's a program called fwcutter that handles the wireless card if it's a broadcom 43xx series, should get you unplugged again, I know I never liked having a cat5 leash on my computer, makes it harder to sit on the couch eating cheetoes and helping people with linux.

linuxwireless,org/en/users/Drivers/b43 (URL messed up to allow posting since I just decided to start being more useful here, www + remove the comma to go)

[evanh]

Reed9,
Thank you for your help
I've put the outputs of your suggested queries into a text document.
I will also try downloading linux wireless

Thank you both
e

[reed9]

Your card is an Intel 5100, which uses the iwlagn driver. It also requires firmware, which in Ubuntu is provided by the linux-firmware package. (b43-fwcutter as suggested above is not applicable to this card.)

There is nothing obviously wrong based on the info you provided.

Does this return local networks?

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

What does this return? (It will just be a single number.)

cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill*/state

One easy step is to try install a more recent driver. The easiest way to do this (though it might not be the absolute latest) is to install linux-backports-modules-karmic

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic

[evanh]

Hey I think the ubuntu installation was somehow corrupted by the updates because I was also having problems booting to ubuntu, half the time it was saying "could not find ubuntu boot".

I reinstalled ubuntu and declined the updates and it seems to be working fine now. It'll be hard to find out which update was the problem since I downloaded all of them.

Hopefully that helps track down a potential problem. Let me know if there is more I can do to help