New XPS 13 Ivy Bridge w Ubuntu 12.04 - no stable wireless

I am having the same wifi issues as everybody else on my brand new Dell XPS Developer Edition.  I really love the look and feel of this notebook, but having to constantly fight the wifi might force me to return it.  I've had laptops in the past that i've had to fight with wifi drivers to make them work, so having Linux support on this was one of the main selling points for me.  Someone mentioned in an above post that dell sent a technician to replace the wifi card, is that my only option?  I really don't have the time or patience to upgrade this thing to 12.10 to see if it fixes the problem

I haven't got around to upgrading yet, but having done a bit more digging this doesn't look promising at all: bugs.launchpad.net/.../1159145

Seems iwlwifi has been *really* broken since the kernel moved to the 3.x source tree according to this: bugs.launchpad.net/.../836250

:(

Fwiw, I booted Fuduntu (Fedora 14 forked distro with Ubuntu ease-of-use philosophy) from an external drive and had zero disconnections from the same corporate network over a good hour, when Ubuntu 12.04 was dropping every few minutes, strongly pointing to a driver issue rather than firmware.

It may well be worth looking at Fuduntu's / Fedora's implementation of the iwlwifi driver to ascertain what's borked in the Ubuntu implementation (and, from a quick bit of Google-fu, apparently Gentoo's as well).

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the kernel in the above was from the 3.7.4 source tree.

EDIT #2: I've been on Fuduntu all afternoon and not had a single drop of connection. Hopefully this is useful in resolving the Ubuntu iwlwifi issues.

How does it perform on regular consumer grade wifi routers?  Wifi has been working well at work, but not home.  I'm tempted to replace the router, but why should I when its working fine for every other wifi device i've thrown at it?

Admittedly I only get a few drops on consumer hardware. Best I can make out from scouring the interwebs is it's a bug somewhere in the 802.11n and possibly 802.11a implementations. If you're having issues with a single device only, logic would suggest that that piece of hardware is likely the errant component (or one that matches a set of error conditions with your wireless card).

Having the same problem at home, but doing what iandouglas writes fixes the problem for me and now I've been surfing at top speed...

FYI this was just tweeted out by Dell Support

Dell #XPS13: Wireless Doesn't Work With #Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support or Ubuntu 12.10.

http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/us/en/19/KCS/KcsArticles/ArticleView?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&docid=596964&dgc=SM&cid=248066&lid=4723011016n046

Great stuff thanks Barton, will give that a try tomorrow when on site.

That link didn't work for me, but this (from the tweet) did: http://t.co/Ofhyyr3SNQ

Haven't got to site yet so not yet tried out the workaround above, but I did a bit more digging and found the following in the changelog for the 3.4.6 kernel:

"commit 342bbf3fee2fa9a18147e74b2e3c4229a4564912

   Author: Johannes Berg

   Date:   Sun Mar 4 08:50:46 2012 -0800

       iwlwifi: always monitor for stuck queues

       If we only monitor while associated, the following

       can happen:

        - we're associated, and the queue stuck check

          runs, setting the queue "touch" time to X

        - we disassociate, stopping the monitoring,

          which leaves the time set to X

        - almost 2s later, we associate, and enqueue

          a frame

        - before the frame is transmitted, we monitor

          for stuck queues, and find the time set to

          X, although it is now later than X + 2000ms,

          so we decide that the queue is stuck and

          erroneously restart the device

   Signed-off-by: Stanislaw Gruszka

   Signed-off-by: John W. Linville

   Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman "

When I get a few minutes spare (when that will be though is anyone's guess! :emotion-4:  )I'm going to roll a new kernel from the latest 3.8.5 sources and also run a diff on the firmware microcode that's installed and the version that's available at wireless.kernel.org/.../iwlwifi

Hello, same issue as every body on my brand new XPS 13 developer edition with Ubuntu 12.04 The wifi connection can't seem to hold. This ubuntu thread : ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php seemed to help but did not solve the problem completely.

One thing I noticed though is that the connection drop when I do a long download from an apt-get for example (trying to install eclipse for instance) either by command line or using the software library.

This seems to me that this points out that longshiptech might be onto something there.

This is a very disapponting issue to have on such a brand new nice laptop.

[Edit]

After a long time with no drop I tried to run a sudo apt-get install eclipse and my connection dropped after a few seconds of connection to the ubuntu repos.

However, no problem at all to download eclipse from the mirror. Clearly, you got something there longshiptech. 

As yet I've not had a chance to roll a new kernel (will probably be this weekend at the earliest), but just to confuse the issue yesterday it was rock solid all day. Go figure.

The only thing I can think is vaguely different yesterday I was at my desk all day and didn't move around the building for meetings etc so *in theory* I didn't transfer between access points. However this is massively ambiguous speculation, and I have had other days where I've been at the same desk for several hours continuously and had the NIC jumping up and down, so probably a total red herring.

Hi to all,

I post some of my investigation here to help anyone out there struggling with this like i do (not contacted dell support yet though) :

So :

When i run lspci -nn I get (between others) this piece of info : 

01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6235 [8086:088e] (rev 24)

Which then point to me to this thread on the ubuntu forum : 

ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php

And this seems to be an issue related to kernel 3.2 which is what Ubuntu 12.04 is based on confirmed by running a uname -r

So the two solutions I see at this point are : upgrade to 12.10 to get kernel 3.5 or try to patch the driver from the git repositories (no idea if this might work at all so I am guessing this is not a viable option)

I still need to test to connect to a different access point than from home to confirm all this but this kind of mess up is really really disappointing. I thought that the machine would have been more tested as I feel that I am experiencing some known issues.

My model (the beta Sputnik from last September) has the Centrino Advances 6230 and Ubuntu 12.10 still has issues in an environment with multiple Enterprise hotspots. When it's a single hotspot (my setup at home, or tethering to my phone), it's flawless. But when I'm in a large office with three hotspots on the ceilings and trying to flip between them, I often get periods of time where restarting the NetworkManager helps, other times I need to reboot, other times i have to give up and tether on my phone.

Is anyone else having intermittant issues?  My wifi will work fine for several days, then all the sudden it wont connect to anything at all.  I tried the rfkill thing from the dell tweet a few posts above, but when I run rfkill list, nothing is blocked.