Hello,
I have ubuntu 17.10 on a laptop. My wireless internet connects, but after a while(shows as a question mark in gnome). I did some research stating that it was a bug in network manager. The prob can only be fixed each time by disabling wifi and re enabling it. Does anybody know a fix for this issue.

I have a
Network controller : Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 31)

Any input would be greatly appreciated

I need to preface this by saying that the issues I experienced never required me to turn off/on wi-fi. Here's my experience. I had an Intel device. It was a mini device attached to a PCI-X board. The signal strength was so poor that remote connections would disconnect. I then purchased a high-gain USB device that used a Realtek RTL8812 chipset. It had excellent signal strength and quality but it would drop the connection several times a minute. Finally, purchased another USB device with a Realtek RTL8814 chipset. The signal strength is almost as good as with the high-gain device and still excellent. The device is quite stable. I don't believe it's dropped a connection yet in about 2 weeks. This particular device is a Netgear Nighthawk A7000.

For troubleshooting I used wavemon. It's a command line utility that displays a statistics page and a graph. The graph defaults with +10db at the high end and the device is somewhere near +20db so it doesn't show up on the graph. There is a way to adjust that within the application. There is also a troubleshooting mode that varies the signal strength so you can view signal to noise ratios. It's purpose isn't real clear so at first I was wondering why the signal strength was all over the place in that mode. In the end I didn't find that mode very useful.

So, the moral of this story is that the issue could very easily be the device, the driver or the network manager. You may need to purchase another device for troubleshooting.

Hi,

Thanks, are you saying that it is a signal strength issue. I have a very strong wifi router and my tablet and phone connect from much farther away. The laptop is within 3 - 8 ft of my router. But I had this exact same prob on an older laptop(at a different residence). The one im inquiring about is brand new.

Sorry im still a bit of a newbi, im just an avg user.

Have a great weekend

A little more info about your wireless device might be helpful here. Run the following command and report back....
This may well be a power management issue with the wireless hardware. Consider installing TLP. It can be configured to inhibit wireless power management if desired....

https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/tlp...p-battery-life
http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/tlp.html

I'm saying both. The first device had a low and very unstable signal strength and the antenna was about 8 feet from the router. The symptom I saw was that Windows Remote Desktop Connection would drop and reconnect frequently.

The first new device had excellent signal strength but would drop the connection in intervals ranging from between 1 second and one minute. The signal strength and quality reported by wavemon didn't indicate a drop in signal or signal quality. The symptom was that NX Nomachine connections and QuickBooks would stop working and wouldn't come back without closing and opening the software again.

Due to the nature of troubleshooting the issue I also switched from a wireless router to a Ubiquity wireless access point. That didn't resolve the issues with the wi-fi devices but it resolved two other issues. The first is that with the router, devices would only connect at 1/2 their rated speed and that router had an issue where I had to back off the maximum connection speed or some devices would never connect.

Hello I seem to have solved my issue.
Below is the solution i did.
-In software and updates I clicked the additional drivers tab, it showed only one device and it said unknown. I clicked to use the properiary driver, but it mislead me as to the driver for AMD GPU. That seemed to fix pt of my issue.
-The next step is i found out the power management was shutting my wireless card off after sometime. Through trial and error. I had to click wifi turning off on standby which ended up doing the reverse. Anyways its fixed now.
thank you all for your help.
it is a miswording in power options.

As I suspected might be the case. Good to read that you've got it sorted.