Currently (on the same laptop) running Mint 17 / xfce (Live DVD) and
https://www.dropbox.com/s/uevsgwt6xnybfvb/wifi.png

Let's see how this works.

Got to go to work. No (noticeable) connection breaks this far...

To be honest, I'm not sure if the problem netbook was N capable, but the router was, and once I switched to wpa2 authentication, the problem vanished. But the symptoms were similar and I'd ultimately have to reboot in order to get the wifi working again.

cheers,

I've had a similar problem for the last few weeks. In this case WPA2 has not been the answer. Of the 3 operating systems on this hard drive, Slackware64-current, PC-BSD 10.x, and winXP-SP3, only XP has been able to consistently make the connection and hold on to it.

Back home on the laptop.

I got to do some things, but I'll leave the machine (and the connection) on. Let's see if it breaks.

Yep, Mint 17 + WEP, no connection breaks.
With Mint 13 (before Slackware) + WPA, no connection breaks.

I don't think it's HW.

Back to Slackware:
I wonder which logs I should look into to find out where the connection is lost. I think in the lowest level there is no break. NM doesn't recognize a connection break, but suddenly web browser doesn't get anywhere before I manually disconnect and reconnect.

After a couple of breaks this evening, I decided to try WEP for a change (on Slackware).
Let's see how it works.

First connection break with WEP experienced.

Good! You don't want to rely on wep anyway, it could be cracked in minutes. It's been classed as "broken" since ~2001.

With wicd, have you tried changing the "backend" to ioctl? I've had some success with several wifi cards in the past concerning random disconnects. Where it says "unsupported", it meerly means the devs won't handle bug reports for it, as it makes direct calls to the kernel, and the wicd devs aren't kernel developers.

This sounds a little like what I hit with wicd some time back (if you want the whole story, search for wicd and my name, i'm sure you'll find it)

When i looked into wicd's settings, it was doing a separate config for each network ssid + channel... meaning that if a router switch channels or, as was my case, there were overlaping network coverage in a large building and channels were offset so that when you walked from one end to the other, you jumped channels as you switched access points, but stayed with the same ssid, wicd would go through it's full "disconnect + reconnect" as if you were changing networks.. this broke all of my current connections each time.

My solution was killing wicd, may that application burn in hell, and just configuring wpa_supplicant and wpa_gui to handle my wireless networking needs. Both of these are included with a basic install of slackware.

About WEP: doesn't really matter. I live in a place where I have only a handful of neighbours within a half-a-mile radius, and most of them
are older than me (I'm 51) and not so much into computers.

Maybe I should find out about changing the "backend"...

In my case, the gui of wicd or network manager doesn't even realize that something is wrong with the connection.
Autoconnect doesn't autoconnect, and the status is "connected". I know from the behaviour of the web browser (or other application, like sbopkg) when the connection is broken.

I would really like to know at which level the break happens and which logs sould I read to find out what's going on.
Or maybe I could monitor the wifi driver directly with some (test) SW? Does anybody know any such SW?

My BS (Buffalo WHR G300N) uses three channels: WEP, TKIP and AES on the same band.
I haven't touched its configurations for years.
Still, Mint 17 (or Mint 13 before) has no problems with connections. WEP uses WEP and TKIP and AES use WPA1 personal.
Also Debian 5.x and 6.x (previously), and Ubuntu 14.04 (now) on my other machine (with the notorious Raling wifi-card) have had no problems.

I've been thinking, maybe I should disable the WEP.

I've been googling around the net as crazy, and all the similar - or narly similar - cases are years old (closer to 10 years old). Nowadays there shouldn't be problems with Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG.
I didn't restrict my googling to Slackware.

The driver version is:
1.2.2kmprq
The firmware should match:
$ ls ipw2200*
ipw2200-fw-3.1-fw-1

and they are loaded:
# modinfo ipw2200
filename: /lib/modules/3.10.17/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ipw2x00/ipw2200.ko
firmware: ipw2200-bss.fw
firmware: ipw2200-sniffer.fw
firmware: ipw2200-ibss.fw
license: GPL
author: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
version: 1.2.2kmprq
description: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver

Any idea where to look next?
Any idea how to manually reinstall all the appropriate wlan SW?
(Don't even know what packages are needed.)

I think the problem is solved now.

First my wife was telling me about her minilaptop (Windows 7) experiencing network breaks. Then yesterday morning I realized that I couldn't get anywhere - not even with the wired PCs. My old faithful Zyxel Prestige 660 ADSL/router had had it. Servwd well for more than 10 years.
That's why the network didn't work, but my wifi-AP still gave signal, so iwlist was happy.

What a coinsidence?

Yesterday got a new box: Acer N12U. Crap! Totally! Had to disable the wifi altogether and use my old Buffalo as the AP still. Oh, well, at least the ADSL/router part works now.

Time will show if it was the problem. This far looks good.

Yep. about 16 hours without a single break.