wlan0 - Just Shoot Me

[jglen490]

So, after two exceptionally frustrating rounds of failed upgrades from 12.04.4 to 14.04.1, and falling back twice I managed to kill my wireless interface. /dev/wlan0 does not exist and NetworkManager will not let me add a wireles interface. The Ralink wifi card does exist and it was working exceptionally well until I deleted the wireless interface from the tray. The wired one exists, but I don't have a 50 foot cat5 cable to get to my router from the desktop unit.

So I guess I need to figure out where to find the module and be re-educated on how to manually set up a wireless connection - or just shoot me -

Thank you for any help or info on finding the wifi 101 course.

[sithlord48]

is it off via a softswitch . like fn +F2 on my laptop will turn off my wifi card. some have a hard switch try them if you do. alot of times its just simply off.

[jglen490]

No switches - hard or soft on the desktop's card. I physically deleted the NetworkManager tray object that was for the wireless connection. That took away /dev/wlan0 and any vestiges of the connection that did exist. I've manually created wifi connections before, but that was long ago and a few brain cells away from where I am today.

thank you.

[jglen490]

Found the problem. Sometime during the fallback from the failed attempt at 14.04.1, my platform ended up on 12.04.5 vs 12.04.4. Along with that came a new kernel - 3.13.0. There was no driver module present for the Ralink wireless card, thus no wireless connection. I modified Grub to boot from the still present 3.2.0 kernel, which does have the rl2850pci module, and all is well. I think I will stay with 12.04.5 and simply boot with the older kernel until I can find a solution to the 14.04.1 Reboot kernel panic issue. On this platform, Precise is quite stable and useful even with the older kernel, so there will be no unintended kernel upgrades unless I'm sure that all drivers and modules are also present.

Thank you for looking!