the wireless card on my dell inspiron unexpectedly stopped working this morning after installing some security updates; however the night before i also installed a patched version of compat wireless to fix the channel -1 bug, and the mac80211.compat08082009.wl_frag+ack_v1.patch. everything worked fine after i installed it; i was also able to connect to my AP and browse web with it... then software manager popped up and said i need security updates so installed them powered off the machine and went to sleep. fired it up and no wireless. iwconfig doesnt see any wifi card although lspci says its there. i've tried removing/reinstalling the b43 proprietary driver through the ubuntu additional drivers ui, but it still doesnt show up and theres no wifi light on the unit itself... i have no clue what happened to it, but id like to be able to fix it without re-installing the distro itself...


Turns out reinstalling the compat-wireless package fixed my problem; i just forgot to enter "sudo make unload" then re load my drivers using "modprobe". even though my problem is solved for now i still have no clue as to what fragged my wifi in the first place

Thanks for posting the solution. That's the LQ spirit.

A suggestion for the future: If you answer your own question, put the solution in a separate post; this does 2 good things:

• It generates e-mail to anyone who subscribed to either the thread or the forum.
• It avoids the creation of oxymoronic 0-reply solved threads.