If you have been like eagerly installed the latest distribution of Ubuntu which was available a couple of days back then welcome to the party of misbehaving wireless connections.
The Ubuntu version 9.04 was released publically on April 23rd and is called the Jaunty Jackalope. Given the cool features it was a high priority on my update list.
After I updated my wireless connection started dropping at frequent intervals of 5-10 minutes and this was enough to frustrate me. At first I thought it was due to a heavy download that I had initiated but the problem persisted even when i paused the download.
Next step was to explore the Internet to see how many other people were facing the issue. Not many but some. But, none is close to the problem that I am facing.
So this is what I did,
I changed the grub order of menu.lst to load an earlier version of the kernel to see if the problem went away. First, I loaded the
title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic version by changing the default boot order to 8
i.e in the menu.lst look at the following section and change the highlighted portion
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify ‘saved’ instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command ‘savedefault’.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use ‘savedefault’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default 8
This helped the connection dropping out problem and the connection did not drop at all but the battery would not charge now 😦 and my skype would make the system crash as soon as I turned on the video.
Next, I changed the kernel version to title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.27-11-generic i.e by changing the default order to 2.
Again, the connection breakage frequency has gone down, the battery is charging fine, but firefox is hell slow now and is consuming a lot of memory.
So though the connection issue is resolved but there are several other things which need to be monitored to ensure that they are working fine. This reminds me of my promise last time that I made to myself that I would upgrade after at least one month of the new version, but I let it go this time 🙂 For now I am making the same promise to myself again, lets c what does 9.10, which should be called the King Kong version have in store.
c0nnexx10n : C0nnect1ng L1fe w1th Techn010gy 
Scott
Monday, April 27, 2009
I am also having similar problems. When surfing the internet on the previous Ubuntu version (8.10), the only time I had a connection problem was due to my provider. I am using a wireless connection. Hopefully, there will be a patch soon to fix whatever is going on. I am concerned that at this point you mentioned your fixes helped, but I am perceiving that the issue is not totally solved.
vikashazrati
Monday, April 27, 2009
Hi Scott, yes that is true. Right now this is a temporary fix which gives me more time with my wireless connection but it is not fixed yet 😦 Lets hope that there is a patch soon.
vikashazrati
Monday, May 4, 2009
Ok right now I am running on a default 6 for the last few days and have seldom faced the connection drop problem. The skype video still manages to crash Ubuntu on random basis.
Colypso
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
I was having problems with my 9.04 64 bit dropping wireless connections. I changed the MTU from auto to 1500 and my problem seems to be solved. I think there is a bug with network manager setting the MTU too low. Hope this helps someone.
vikashazrati
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thanks Ethan for your input, for the wireless would it still be 1500 or less than that?
For the rest of us, new to MTU 🙂
Maximum Transmission Unit(MTU), the largest physical packet size, measured in bytes, that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are divided into smaller packets before being sent. MTU depends on the network and for Ethernet the largest packet size is 1500. For temporarily changing MTU do
sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1492
for permanently changing it go to the interfaces file in
sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
more details here http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-change-mtu-maximum-transmission-unit-of-network-interface-in-ubuntu-linux.html. Please leave a comment here if this solution worked for you.
Ryan G
Saturday, June 12, 2010
I was having trouble for the longest time getting my wireless to run for more than 2 minutes without disconnecting. I changed the MTU to 1500 and now it seems to be working fine. (I just did it like 30 minutes ago, so fingers crossed it keeps this up…)
Vikas Hazrati
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Sounds good Ryan, thanks for sharing your experience
hemin
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Hi friends I have similar problem with wireless I am using it alongside windows 7 but i can not connect the my wireless however i do not have any with the cable connection … please help how can I fix it ,
p.s my ubuntu is the version 11.0