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I have a shiny new HP Pavilion g series laptop (g7). The very first boot of the system was a gparted-live usb to split out some space for Ubuntu. The second was a 12.04 live usb.

Mostly it is working extremely well. The exception is WiFi connectivity. It seems to connect at first, but then after anywhere from 30 minutes to four hours I lose connection and cannot reconnect until I reboot the router. Sometimes an RFKill block and unblock will fix it. And yesterday I saw a suggestion to remove the NetworkManager.conf file. The latter seems to have extended the time to failure to hours rather than minutes.

What should my next steps be?

Thanks

Skip Huffman
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3 Answers3

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Solution found.

very simple actually. I needed to load the chipset specific driver.

I found the specific version of my chipset with lpci

Then I looked on the chipset manufacturers web site and found linux drivers.

I downloaded and extracted the tarball.

I ran "sudo make install" from terminal in the appropriate directory.

Reboot and all seems perfect.

I will try to add truly specific instructions later when I am back with my laptop.

Skip Huffman
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  • those specific instructions would be quite helpful right now. – topher Feb 08 '13 at 18:36
  • Oops, I guess I forgot to do that. (at work with windows now, can't check it.) – Skip Huffman Feb 08 '13 at 18:39
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    I followed these instructions. However, I got errors when running compiling the driver. I followed the instructions from http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/wireless-internet/177469-solved-wireless-scientific-linux-6-help-3.html#post839118 and applied the patch from http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/compiling-broadcom-driver-947294/#post4689850. After applying these sudo make install plus a reboot fixed the problem. – topher Feb 10 '13 at 11:50
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From what I understand it could be a driver or hardware issue if connectivity isn't the problem. If you can find out what the exact chip-set is, run a Google search and see if others have had similar problems. Other reasons things could be that configuration is all messed up, Ubuntu just doesn't support the card, or somebody's hardware is failing.

If its just this one computer having the issue and not others, then it's probably not the router. Maybe try getting one of those cheap USB WiFi adaptors. Disable the built in WiFi and use the external one. You can at least isolate the problem to the chipset.

Be sure to check the "Restricted Drivers" in the System Settings to see if there is a proprietary one to use.

Prof 64
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  • Honestly I don't think signal strength is the issue. Where I am most of the time the router is twenty feet away with nothing but a gypsum board wall in between. Also I see three 'rings' of strength pretty much all the time. And my wife's netbook has no trouble. (Ubuntu 12.04, HP Mini) – Skip Huffman Jun 02 '12 at 20:32
  • okay I agree with you then. Connectivity is not the issue. Lets see. Do you have this problem on other operating systems; either windows or other Linux distros? – Prof 64 Jun 04 '12 at 00:09
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Ok, more specific Steps:

Run lspci and look for your wifi adapter

In my case it turns out to be a Realtek RTL8188CE

Googleing that brings me to the manufacturer's page. Then search for "linux" in the page's search box leads me to a big list of downloads. Here: http://www.realtek.com.tw/search/default.aspx?keyword=linux

And on that page I see my model number and click on it, bringing me here: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=48&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true#RTL8188CE

Oh look! Nice shiny driver update! Only a bit over a week old. Nice. Time to download that.

Extract tar-ixvf linux_max8*tar.bz2

cd into the directory and look at the readme file. Install is pretty straightforward. Change to superuser. Make. Make install. Reboot.

Give that a try. (Saving now. will edit after reboot.)

That worked just fine. I am going to assume that all is well and accept this answer. Hope it helps anyone watching.

Skip Huffman
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