Ubuntu – “Starting Wireless Hotspot…” but nothing happens

androidhot-spotwireless

I was trying to create an WiFi hotspot for my android device. I used ap-hotspot to do so.

I configured the ap-hotspot using 

sudo ap-hotspot configure

Then I started ap-hotspot using 

sudo ap-hotspot start

Then it shows this 

Starting Wireless Hotspot...

And then nothing happens, no further message is displayed, hotspot is not created.

What is Wrong? How to fix it?

Best Answer

ap-hotspot uses hostapd to create wireless network

I had problems creating hotspot using hostapd in Ubuntu 14.04 mainly because new version of hostapd in 14.04 default repository is buggy.

You can solve this problem by downgrading hostapd in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to a previous version

Uninstall buggy hostapd using apt-get:

sudo apt-get remove hostapd

Then install non-buggy version of hostapd:

  • 64 - bit:

    cd /tmp
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/w/wpa/hostapd_1.0-3ubuntu2.1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i hostapd*.deb
sudo apt-mark hold hostapd

  • 32 - bit:

    cd /tmp
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/w/wpa/hostapd_1.0-3ubuntu2.1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i hostapd*.deb
sudo apt-mark hold hostapd

"sudo apt-mark hold hostapd" will prevent hostapd to upgrade to the buggy version.

Then try running ap-hotspot again, I think it should work. It worked for me like a charm.

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