I have been having an unstable wifi connection for a while. It can go hours for disconnecting, or happen within a minute of starting my laptop.
I have tried both Network Manager and Wicd. It's probably unrelated, but
wicd connects fine before logging into the X server, but is flaky afterwords.
Another strange thing is that when I used Porteus live usb, there are no problems. Is there a way to use only the 2.4GHz channel to troubleshoot?

Laptop: Acer Aspire 5750
Wireless card: Centrino Advanced-N 6205 [Taylor Peak] by Intel

Does this also happen when you are connected to another router?

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You can connect to your router's 2.4 ghz channel. It might be overlapping wifi channels too if you have neighbors. You might want to run a scan with inSSIDer to see what is going on in your wifi neighborhood then pick channel 1, 6, or 11. You want a wifi channel that has no one on it. The second best option is to share the same channel with no overlapping. Overlapping wifi channels will cause wifi distruptions.

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maybe you have a 2.4 and 5 GH router?
I had this problem, wifi changed permanently between 2.4 and 5 GHz

network manager does this
https://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2016/05...nd-wifi-scans/

solution was to set the BSSID in the network manager fix to the wanted frequency of the router

Also, the wifi channels, throught wicd show no interfering channels.
Hydrurga: I have no access to another router unless I go to a coffee shop.

How thirsty are you?

It's worth a go though. Even a friend's router. With the proviso however that you might have to burn through a few coffees if the problem doesn't reoccur quickly.

Your information about the Porteus live USB is useful though as that would indicate that the problem lies on the other hand with the distro. Have you run the live USB for long enough periods of time, running roughly the same programs as your installed distro (e.g. streaming and other internet-intensive tasks), and with the same router, to check that the issue doesn't occur with it?

I will have to check later. It does seem to go a couple of hours under normal use on the live distro, which includes youtube streaming.

It is probably just by chance, but when I first boot up, and before a GUI, the connection is good.
So because of this I was able to do an update. It was running fine on wifi for a couple of hours
after that, so I will mark this as solved (For now).

Check to see if there is a difference between the drivers used in the two distros. I had this problem with my old laptop after a driver upgrade. The new driver was always intermittent even though it was supposed to be compatible. Downgrading to an older version of the driver solved my problem.