How to reconfigure wifi after mistake?

Question

My wifi was suffering badly in the past week. Very slow speeds and lots of interruptions. I know found out that the problem was with the modem and not with Ubuntu.

In the mean time I used this answer to remove my intel driver and reinstall it. BUT it failed. It left me without a functional driver. I tried running modprobe, reinstall the kernel, copying the backup files of the drivers back, all to no avail.

Now I'm left without a network adapter, and without a functional driver.

How can I restore the system to its original state?

Background:

lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2200 [8086:0891] (rev c4)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2200 BGN [8086:4222]

The network is unclaimed

*-network UNCLAIMED
   description: Network controller
   product: Centrino Wireless-N 2200
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
   version: c4
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:f3500000-f3501fff

@GeorgeUdosen None, I'm not even getting anything with dmesg | grep wifi. — don.joey, Dec 12 '18 at 21:26
I'm guessing this could have to do with installing backport-iwlwifi? — don.joey, Dec 12 '18 at 21:43
Please try the suggestion in your other question and tell us if there is any improvement. — chili555, Dec 12 '18 at 22:24
@chili555 I confirm that uninstall backport-iwlwifi did the trick, as described here https://askubuntu.com/questions/1100472/how-to-undo-the-installation-of-backport?noredirect=1#comment1813645_1100472. Do you want me to delete my question, or do you want to write a few lines in an answer? — don.joey, Dec 13 '18 at 09:59
I posted an answer. I will look forward to your new question about iwlwifi and slow speeds. I am anxious to help. — chili555, Dec 13 '18 at 15:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 13 '18 at 15:09

You installed backport-iwlwifi which evidently was incompatible in some way with your Ubuntu version. It was suggested that you uninstall it:

cd backport-iwlwifi 
sudo make uninstall

Uninstalling the backport package allows the original in-kernel modules to reclaim your device.

How to reconfigure wifi after mistake?

1 Answers1