No wireless on Asus N53S

[jbang]

I'm now runnig Kubuntu 14.04 on an Asus N53S, but when this all started I was running Kubuntu 12.04.

A good while ago the built-in wireless in my laptop started to go wonky, loosing the connection and wanting me to re-enter the wifi password more and more often. I finally borrowed a Sandberg Wifi USB micro dongle from a friend, and that worked. But unfortunately I had to give it back at some point. While I had the dongle I disabled the built-in wireless somehow. But I don't remember how I did it. The dongle still worked, so it was only the built-in that got disabled.

After giving the dongle back I upgraded from 12.04 to 14.04.

I have now bought my own Sandberg wifi USB micro dongle, but I can't get it to work. When I click the network icon in the system tray, it shows the wireless network as being disabled.

The output from dmesg when I insert the dongle can be found at the end of this post.

I get nothing from ifconfig about a wlan device.

I get a couple of lines about wlan3 from iwconfig:
wlan3 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thrff
Power Managementn

What do I need to do to get the wireless activated and connected to my network? :-)

Thanks in advance
Jens

When I insert the dongle I get this from dmesg:
[ 4282.465673] usb 2-1.4: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[ 4282.559461] usb 2-1.4: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8176
[ 4282.559475] usb 2-1.4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 4282.559481] usb 2-1.4: Product: 802.11n WLAN Adapter
[ 4282.559487] usb 2-1.4: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 4282.559492] usb 2-1.4: SerialNumber: 00e04c000001
[ 4282.560196] rtl8192cu: Chip version 0x10
[ 4282.643091] rtl8192cu: MAC address: 74:da:38:14:dd:b7
[ 4282.643096] rtl8192cu: Board Type 0
[ 4282.643335] rtl_usb: rx_max_size 15360, rx_urb_num 8, in_ep 1
[ 4282.643370] rtl8192cu: Loading firmware rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw_TMSC.bin
[ 4282.710140] ieee80211 phy2: Selected rate control algorithm 'rtl_rc'
[ 4282.711025] rtlwifi: wireless switch is on
[ 4282.913279] systemd-udevd[4584]: renamed network interface wlan1 to wlan3
[ 4282.914532] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan3: link is not ready

[TWPonKubuntu]

Did you use BIOS to disable the internal wireless adapter?

Detail process here:

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/enabl...ook-52070.html

[jbang]

I'm sorry for my slow reply, but my Saturday was a little hectic. :-)

I have checked, and I didn't disable the internal wireless via the BIOS. But if I had, would that really also have disabled the USB wireless? And if it had, wouldn't it also have disabled the USB wireless I had working at the time, when I disabled the internal wireless?

[TWPonKubuntu]

Hmmm, I guess my bios is different than yours. I can disable the onboard wife adapter and still
install and use the external.

I see you have a realtek chip (rtlwifi/rtl8192cufw), I have had trouble with those, on my Kubuntu system,
in the past. I was forced to install the driver manually, since it was not recognized by the kernal.
I finally bought an adapter using another chip, to avoid the hassel, but you had this working, so
that should not be the problem in this case.

A re-install is all I can suggest, sorry

[jbang]

I think we're talking at cross purposes. What I meant was that I could disable my on-board Wifi in the BIOS, without disabling any other WifI. But it wasnø't disabled. The reason I brought up that disabling the Wifi would maybe also disable the USB WiFi was because your first post seemed to assume that.

If your Asus matches the description you postedm then our BIOSes are different. My BIOS was slightly different, both in where the WiFi disable option was, and in the texts. This is probably because my Asus isn't a netbook, but a full laptop.

There's new information: I have had the chance to do a quick test with the USB dongle that worked, and it no longer works in my laptop, so something must have happened during my 12-04 -> 14.04 upgrade.

I really don't have the energy for a re-install. Maybe I should start out trying to upgrade to 14.10?

[TWPonKubuntu]

I can't advise on whether the 14.10 upgrade would help. I am staying on 14.04 as the LTS support works for me.

I do suspect that the time/effort to do the upgrade will equal a re-install of 14.04... Backup, Backup, Backup