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I installed Kubuntu Feisty about one year ago. That was my first Linux installation. Since then I got plenty of troubles with my (pci) wifi card a WMP54G with a ralink rt61 chipset. But the most surprising is that each time you update the ubuntu version you need to setup again but differently your wifi network. My first advice is use a wirewith connection as much as you can. My second advice is if you have a rt61 chipset just change it. A wireless card is not that expensive. I should have done that one year ago, I would have avoided many troubles. Under Feisty Fawn after some work the wifi was perfectly working in wpa. With Gutsy Gibbon it was working ok but only in wep. And with Hardy Heron, it is working in wep but I still have some weird problems. The wifi card does not wake up from suspend ot hibernate and if my router is rebooted I cannot connect. In all cases I need to reboot. Here is my configuration.
In my current configuration I have uninstalled networkmanager or wicd. My /etc/network/interfaces file has :
auto ra0
iface ra0 inet static
address 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.254
wireless-essid myssid
wireless-key 0000000000To solve the wifi loss on hibernate problem I tried to add “rt61pci” to the MODULES_WHITELIST in /etc/default/acpi-support file :
# Note that network cards and USB controllers will automatically be unloaded
# unless they're listed in MODULES_WHITELIST
MODULES=""
# Add modules to this list to leave them in the kernel over suspend/resume
MODULES_WHITELIST="rt61pci"It had some effect. Now the wifi card is alive (connected to the local network, ip ok) after standby however internet connection still does not work. In case you need to know the name of your wifi module you can use the command :
sudo lshw # lists your hardware and the drivers used.From this bug report it seems that installing the linux-backports-modules-hardy-generic package should help. That will be my next step.
By the way here is a list of useful commands to configure your wifi on Linux :
lsusb # USB hardware list
lspci # PCI hardware list
sudo lshw -C # network network hardware list
lsmod # loaded modules list
iwconfig # wifi interfaces list
ifconfig # network interfaces list
iwlist # list of the networks that can be scanned by the wifi hardware
cat /etc/network/interfaces # gives you the content of the interfaces file
cat /etc/lsb-release # gives the Linux version you are using
uname -r -m # gives the Linux kernel you are using
sudo ifdown ra0 # stops the ra0 interface
sudo ifup ra0 # starts the ra0 interface
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart # restarts your network interfaceThis list can also be found in French here .
Here is a short list of wifi managers.
network-manager, knetworkmanager, wicd, rutilt, kwifimanager, wifi-radar.
I tried all of them. Wicd proved to be useful in my case even if I am not currently using it. I am still using kwifimanager only to display the state of the connection, it does not configure anything.
I hope you got less troubles with your wifi setup.
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