Wireless / WiFi stopped working after Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade

xlfm22

Wireless / WiFi stopped working after Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade


I hope this helps someone out there, here's my story and how I fixed it.
After I upgrade from 11.04 to 11.10 my WiFi went out during installation and never came back on, even after the install completed. My netbook is a Sony VAIO VPCM111AX, I was familiar with the the ralink wireless issues so I had many rt2 and rt3 wireless drivers blacklisted. So I went back and unblacklisted these drivers.



Code:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf



Quote:

# These don't function with WiFi when netbook is unplugged blacklist rt3390sta blacklist rt2x00lib blacklist rt2800pci blacklist rt2x00usb blacklist rt2x00pci

This didn't solve the problem. I went back to find my specific driver by this:



Code:
lspci | grep work
and I found that my driver was RT3090



Quote:

01:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe

Upon some investigation I found that 11.10 doesn't support some wireless drivers.
Before proceeding I wanted to check a few more things such as



Code:
sudo lshw -C network



Quote:

*-network description: Wireless interface product: RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe vendor: Ralink corp. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 logical name: ra0 version: 00 serial: 0c:ee:e6:ff:17:dd width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=RALINK WLAN driverversion=2.3.1.3 ip=192.168.2.10 latency=0 multicast=yes wireless=Ralink STA resources: irq:16 memory:fe900000-fe90ffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: JMC260 PCI Express Fast Ethernet Controller vendor: JMicron Technology Corp. physical id: 0.5 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.5 logical name: eth0 version: 02 serial: 00:24:be:c4:d4:85 size: 10Mbit/s capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msix msi bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=jme driverversion=1.0.8 duplex=half latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=MII speed=10Mbit/s resources: irq:42 memory:fe800000-fe803fff ioport:e100(size=12 ioport:e000(size=256)

Then:



Code:
lsmod



Quote:

Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12617 1 nls_cp437 12751 1 vfat 17308 1 fat 55577 1 vfat mmc_block 22393 1 bnep 17923 2 rfcomm 38408 8 parport_pc 32114 0 ppdev 12849 0 binfmt_misc 17292 1 btusb 18160 2 uvcvideo 67271 0 videodev 85626 1 uvcvideo snd_hda_codec_realtek 254125 1 bluetooth 148839 23 bnep,rfcomm,btusb snd_hda_intel 24262 2 snd_hda_codec 91754 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 13276 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 80468 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25241 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi joydev 17393 0 snd_seq 51567 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event snd_timer 28932 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 55902 13 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec, snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,sn d_seq_device i915 505108 3 soundcore 12600 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14115 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm psmouse 73673 0 serio_raw 12990 0 rt3090sta 794403 1 drm_kms_helper 32889 1 i915 sony_laptop 39681 0 drm 192226 4 i915,drm_kms_helper jmb38x_ms 17406 0 memstick 15857 1 jmb38x_ms i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 i915 video 18908 1 i915 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp jme 40330 0 sdhci_pci 13658 0 sdhci 27360 1 sdhci_pci

Lastly I checked this:



Code:
rfkill list all



Quote:

0: sony-wifi: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: sony-bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 2: hci0: Bluetooth Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no

If the "no"'s here are yes's for you run this:



Code:
rfkill unblock all
After all this I found an old version of the rt3090 driver here:
https://launchpad.net/~markus-tisoft...0~ppa1_all.deb
I installed the driver and restarted the computer and all is well. I haven't had to reblacklist the other ralink drivers, everything seems to be working well.
I hope this helps someone because this problem drove me mad.
Just for reference: I did find that some computers needed to blacklist certain drivers depending on computer models:



Quote:

blacklist bcm43xx blacklist acer_wmi

There are a lot of other drivers that need to be blacklisted depending on the type of computer you have and others need to install older versions of the wireless driver (as I did) to allow this to work.









http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1860574