Ubuntu – Can’t connect to wifi on Ubuntu 17.04

17.04networkingwireless

I booted Ubuntu 17.04 live on my Fujitsu Amilo Li3710 laptop and I was surprised to see that I couldn't connect to wifi. I tried to connect to my router and my phone as a hotspot but neither work.

I can see wifi networks and when I try to connect it asks for the password, seemingly tries to connect but then it doesn't connect. It gives no visible feedback after failed trials.

Disabling mac filtering and removing the wifi password makes no difference. I tried Ubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Ubuintu MATE and Lubuntu, it's the same everywhere.

I have Ubuntu 16.10 and Windows 10 installed on the laptop, they have no problem connecting.

Is there anything I can do? Or is support for my hardware over in the kernel?

Best Answer

There's a bug in this version of network-manager (1.4.4) that shipped with the initial release of 17.04. It randomizes the MAC address of a wifi chipset when connecting to a new network for security purposes but the end result is that some wifi devices won't connect or won't stay connected to the network with this feature enabled.

The good news is this is actually really easy to fix! To disable the randomized mac address switching and fix your wifi, you just have to edit a config file.

You can read about how to fix this in the answer here.

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Ubuntu – Can’t connect to specific wifi network

There are some issues with certain manufacturer implementations of the wireless N standard that doesn't play nice with Linux. Also sometimes having wired ethernet up can interfere. I wrote a quick script that I placed into my public GitHub repository that fixes this on most people's systems. You can find it here: https://github.com/FreedomBen/handy-bash-scripts/blob/master/fixTheInternet.bash

Run that script each time you boot up, and your wireless should work well. It will be limited to G speeds, but that's still really fast.

If you'd rather run the commands in a terminal yourself, here they are. The script is handy though because you can just run it everytime you boot and you don't have to remember these commands:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down
sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi
sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

Ubuntu – 15.04 can’t connect to password-protected Wifi

I would make sure that:

I typed the right password (silly, but happens more often than not!)
restart network manager
delete saved connection and add it back again (make sure to select the right authentication system)

Best Answer

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