Monday, October 29, 2007

Dell Latitude C640, Ubuntu and WPA2

The Problem:
I have a Dell Latitude C640 which had Ubuntu Feisty Fawn running on it. With my older Linksys WRT54G, everything was going fine, albeit with less security since I could only manage WEP on it. Then a few weeks back the router flamed out and I had to buy a new one.

Interestingly - for those in the market for the new Linksys router you may be confused by a Linux friendly open source model and another Windows compatible one. The specs do not help you understand why they should be different and I figured out only after some Googling what the mystery behind the brand separation was...

Now the new router supports WPA2 and I had to have that running over my wireless network. But here I have an embarrassing problem. While my Windows based Dell Latitude D810 is happily running over the same network, Ubuntu is just not doing that well.


The Solutions:?
Unfortunately no solutions so far. These are some of the things I've tried:

* Removed Network Manager and replaced it with wicd. According to some posts this problem could be due to a problem with Network manager trying to drop WPA2 connections and reconnecting constantly. It did seem to help initially (I could get intermittent connectivity) but not anymore
* Upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon. This has improved a lot of things but not connectivity to a WPA2 wireless network.

More coming up on this investigation...

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