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Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. In that it detects my wireless network but won't connect, it just keeps reprompting me to enter the WEP key! Even if I give correct password it's not connecting. Is there a solution?

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this irritated me so bad I installed Windows 7 RC back onto my Laptop – craigmoliver Jul 24 '09 at 4:25
More information would be useful. Could you add the contents of: $ iwconfig And also say what type of wireless device you have. Try $ lspci $ lsusb and look for wireless to see what it is. – Hamish Downer Aug 4 '09 at 17:28
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migrated from serverfault.com Jul 18 '09 at 14:08

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7 Answers

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It almost sounds like you may have a config file set up to connect for you, which causes network manager/wicd and others like it not to work. I wish I could remember the name of the file you need to check, but hopefully that gives you some more info on what to search for to fix the problem.

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If you are using Ubuntu/Debian, you are probably thinking of something in /etc/network - the interfaces file is the standard one. – Hamish Downer Aug 4 '09 at 17:25
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up vote 1 down vote

Try clean installing Ubuntu 9.04.

There were many improvements made to the Wi-Fi infrastructure in version 9 from version 8. I had a similar problem, and the clean install enabled all the wireless networking to work.

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Before formatting over, the OP might want to boot from a live CD and check whether it's working with that one. – innaM Aug 1 '09 at 20:16
A couple of days ago I did a clean install of 9.10 and got exactly the same problem as the OP - a list of wireless networks, which challenge me for the correct type of authentication, but then keep repeatedly asking for it again instead of connecting. – Daniel Earwicker Mar 21 '10 at 8:59
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up vote 0 down vote

What software do you use? Try wicd:

$ sudo apt-get install wicd
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I have difficulties with ubuntu and wireless networks as well*. Can I download wicd as a .deb package ? I can't download it view apt-get, obviously. *I asked a question about it. – Manu Jul 29 '09 at 18:54
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up vote 0 down vote

Thanks for the pointer to wicd, it's indeed more to my taste. I have a similar problem as the OP, but even installing wicd doesn't solve it (for me). In fact the connection attempt appears to always time out. I'm using the Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix.

I've also tried the alternative madwifi driver which gives exactly the same result (i.e. none).

My guess is that some driver has changed in a way that makes the WLAN card unhappy or so. The weird part is, though, that even the alternative driver doesn't change anything. Booting into Windows XP SP3 works perfectly fine and offers all the wireless connectivity that's expected.

lspci says the card is:

Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev1)

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up vote 0 down vote

You might try to install the windows version of the driver through ndistwrapper too. Works sometimes.

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up vote 0 down vote

You could see if there are any restricted drivers that could be enabled - these are drivers provided by the wireless card chipset manufacturer but not under a FOSS license. To look for these, go to the System Menu -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers

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up vote 0 down vote

When I upgraded to Kubuntu 9.04 I had the same problem. I had to uninstall the Plasma Manager for Wireless, Install wicd And configure wicd to manage my Wireless Network - no problems since then.

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