I had a hard time getting the Intel Wifi 5100 AGN, which is displayed using lspci as “Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5300 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection“. A lot of people are complaining about it. It would be a bug in the kernel, in Ubuntu 10.04, whatever. Nobody seems to get a clear view why it isn’t working. And more, some people state that it “suddenly just works” after reboot. Well, it doesn’t. It’s just because of the modifications that they tried.
I myself tried a lot of those things – first the ones that didn’t require hacking some configuration files that weren’t supposed to be modified. When they didn’t work, I reverted them.
I tried several things, even reconfiguring the wireless router. I tried an open and even a WEP secured network, and it was stunning that those networks didn’t give any problem. Then, I switched back to WPA2 and the connection was lost again after a few seconds.
Accidentally came across this forum post which said to use ndiswrapper (which wasn’t installed so I had to apt-get install ndiswrapper-common).
Of course, I’m not entirely sure this was the fix, but it is stunning that after installing ndiswrapper, the wireless connection works. Even after reboot.
Besides, FYI, during my trials, I connected an old USB wireless adapter. A DLink DWL-122, rev A1. It is an obsolete piece of hardware. DLink doesn’t create drivers for Windows 7 or vista, so it only works in XP. They’re not even mentioning drivers for Linux. They state it is plug and play in Windows 7, but that is only for revision B and C, not the A I have. Besides, it only works with WEP protection, the hardware doesn’t support WPA.
Anyway, when I connected the USB adapter to the ubuntu installation, it was picked up and ready to use instantly. Another plus for Ubuntu and obsolete hardware.