Can't connect to specific wifi network

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 12.10 and I can't connect to a specific password-protected wifi network. I have the password and I can connect to it with success in the same laptop with Windows 8.

I can connect to other wifi networks using Ubuntu, so it seems that this specific network is different somehow in a way that Ubuntu fails to connect to it.

When I try to connect it stays in "connecting" state for a long time (2-5 minutes) until it fails with "Connection failed: activation of network connection failed" error.

How can I fix this?

Solution 1

There are some issues with certain manufacturer implementations of the wireless N standard that doesn't play nice with Linux. Also sometimes having wired ethernet up can interfere. I wrote a quick script that I placed into my public GitHub repository that fixes this on most people's systems. You can find it here: https://github.com/FreedomBen/handy-bash-scripts/blob/master/fixTheInternet.bash

Run that script each time you boot up, and your wireless should work well. It will be limited to G speeds, but that's still really fast.

If you'd rather run the commands in a terminal yourself, here they are. The script is handy though because you can just run it everytime you boot and you don't have to remember these commands:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi
sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

Solution 2

Your wifi module drops the connection, the router might have N that has problem in Linuxes from certain manufacturers. Either disable N or install through ndiswrapper the driver from your win8 disk.

Comments

[Wouter]

I had the same problem, and I could solve it by installing the driver trough ndiswrapper, good suggestion!

[Dessa Simpson]

Why eth0? what does that have to do with wifi?

[Dessa Simpson]

I tried this on my laptop and the wifi just stopped working at all.