My desktop stood unused for a month or so. Powered it on, some upgrades ran. From 9.04 it went into 9.10 and everything was lovely. Even Skype worked perfectly. Then, when I tried booting it a couple of days ago, it wouldn't. Took me 3 hours to start it as there was a fault of some strange type. Until last night it worked ok, but at some point it disconnected from the WLAN and doesn't want to connect back. I've reset the router, checked the security etc. Nothing.
I run 2 HDD's with one full of data (office, mp3, jpg's). Can I just re-install Ubuntu on the other one or is there something else I should really try before I flash the software?
Cheers!

Re-installing just to fix the wireless seems pretty overkill! sorry if you have already tried this/it's obvious but…

I'm not at a linux box at the moment but from memory, have you tried something like 'ifup -a'? To try to bring it back up.

Also if you get something like hwinfo (sudo apt-get install hwinfo) you can see whether it still recognises it? This should also give you the actual chipset so you can try to find the appropriate driver. Once you know what to search for there are 100s of Linux forums and there is quite likely to already be a how to.

I would definitely try to fix it rather than re-install, especially as if you re-install with Karmic and it still doesn't work you are no better off.

Actually, as a thought, restart it, re-run the update manager and the hardware drivers GUI thing, and turn it off and on again if you havent already. It might be that the update shut it down and never brought it back up?

Hope some of this is of use?

Tom

a couple of thoughts …

1) someone in the vicinity has a new wifi that's interfering with yours. try chaning the SSID.
2) NetworkManager is now trying to connect to a different router
3) you've updated NetworkManager recently & that's broken. Colleagues have been having problems on Fedora the last couple of days with it, though i've been ok. I think Ubuntu tracks upstream pretty closely, so if Fedora is suffering an issue, it's also likely to. Might be worth going back a release of NM.

Cheers, I'll be trying to fix it tomorrow.

Sounds like the update went a bit wrong.

Hard wire the box to the back of your router so you get internet connection then run updates manager, check synaptic package as well to see if there is any broken progams and obviously fix if here is.

Apart from that linux forums are your best bet

ok solution is…

connect your laptop/desktop to your router via an ethernet cable. it will then connect to the internet. go into applications and run the update manager. install updates and the wireless will now work.

i had same problem on my laptop when i installed ubuntu 9 as it doesnt work out the box with the wireless broadcom wifi adaptors.

Thanks a lot.