I’m sitting at Octane, a coffee bar here in Atlanta. I order a quad espresso, sit down, and fire up the laptop. I go to System -> Administration -> Networking. I select the Wireless connection and the properties button. Click on the drop down arrow for a listing of available networks.
Nothing.
WTF?!? There are about 10 people around me surfing. There has to be something. Then I remember. This bug got introduced in Ubuntu 6.10.
But this is only a GUI bug. There must be a way of scanning for networks. Thats right: iwlist. From the iwlist man pages, iwlist will “Get more detailed wireless information from a wireless interface.” Awesome. I do a
iwlist eth1 scanning
I get a list of access points, protocols supported, and whether or not they require encryption. I see the ESSID for the hotspot router, type it into the GUI.
Bingo. Connected to the Internet again.
Thank god for the CLI.
Update: In Ubuntu 7.04, I’ve noticed that the above command only lists the network you are connected to at the moment. So to see all networks use sudo:
sudo iwlist scanning
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Same thing happenned to me, you resolution doesn;t seem to fix it though, get all the networks alright… More searching for me i think
It seems you need the gnome-network-manager applet.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/NetworkManager