Kernel upgrade and now no wifi card

I upgraded my ubuntu dapper distribution using synaptic. This resulted in the inability of ubuntu to identify my DLink Wifi card using networking tools. I'm kinda new to linux and don't know what to do. Is there a way to step back the upgrade, add the cards drivers somehow to be seen, or do i have to recompile the kernel and if so how is that done? Now I don't know if its a good idea to keep upgrading the system. Anyway, the easiest possible solution would be greatly appreciated.

I ran into this situation recently on Fedora. I don't know if this applies to your specific problem, but in my case, the WiFi card used a Prism chipset, and two drivers were claiming the card (causing neither to work). You can check for this problem with (as root):

lsmod | grep "orinoco\|hostap"

You should see orinoco drivers or hostap drivers, but not both. If you see both then you need to blacklist one of them:

In the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, add:

# Wireless LAN card
blacklist hostap_cs

In the file /etc/modprobe.conf, add:

alias wlan0 orinoco_cs

Reboot, and check again; only the orinoco drivers should now be loaded, and the card should work.

I'm not seeing either driver when doing the lsmod command.

I think that your new kernel is missing the kernel module for the wireless device.

For example, if I upgraded my kernel from 2.6.13-15.7 to ls 2.6.13-15.8-default,
then my old ndiswrapper is located in ls /usr/modules/2.6.13-15.7/misc/ndiswrapper.ko
But /usr/modules/2.6.13-15.8-default/misc/ is empty. I need to create a new ndiswrapper.ko kernel module.
( Which I do, after a security kernel update, using rpmbuild -bb in my case.)

OK, good, then that's not your issue. Do you know what driver your card used before? Did you set it up or was it automatically configured when you installed your distribution? Does 'ndiswrapper' sound familiar?

Can you provide the output of either (whichever your distribution has):

cardctl ident

or

pccardctl ident

It was automatically configured for me. I did not use the wrapper. Its a Dlink wifi

Unfortunately, "Dlink WiFi" describes about a dozen models/chipset combinations. The output of the above commands will provide the actual internal identifiers.

Tried both those commands, nothing gets listed

Looking under device manager it comes up with the Atheros chipset.

The live cd boots up with the wifi card howcan i get that module over onthe system?

Well just rebooted the previous kernel have my wifi back. Does this mean any future kernel upgrade would cause the lost of my wifi card. I've upgraded the kernel many times through synaptic and haven't had this problem. 2.6.15-23 kernel resulted in the problem.

It looks like this is a recognized bug. I suggest you add a watch for the bug (so you get email on updates) and stay on the earlier kernel until the bug is closed.