Fedora 17 negatively affecting wireless

[Keith Kirk]

I've recently bought a new laptop (Acer Aspire V3-571G) and installed Fedora 17 on it. Slightly after doing this I began experiencing problems with wireless. My laptop would disconnect and immediately try to reconnect, it would display the message that the network required a password (which was already filled in the password field) and when I selected connect it would fail again in a few moments and repeat the process.

I thought at first it was our University's wireless which was having faults (It never has before) as my co-worker was also being disconnected from the network as well (he was running Ubuntu on his laptop). Unfortunately when I got home I found that it wasn't the uni network, when I booted up my laptop it would connect and run fine but after approximately 10 minutes it would start the disconnect reconnect loop, I also noticed that when it disconnected a second later other computers would disconnect as well. I've tested this several times at home using my new laptop, my old fedora 15 laptop and a Windows Vista laptop, once my new laptop gets disconnected the other 2 follow suit in a few seconds.

If my new laptop is off or has it's wireless off then the wireless works perfectly for everyone else, it's only when it is connected that it causes a problem. When I first got the laptop it had Windows 7 on it and I used it to set up a Unetbootin flash drive to install fedora 17, I had no problems using the wireless then and I must've used it for half an hour however I'm unable to retest this as I removed Windows from the laptop when I installed fedora.

My lspci says my Network Controller is: Atheros Communications Inc. Device 0034 (rev 01)

I've tried to resolve this problem myself as it currently renders my laptop pretty unusable (can't install the programs I need with no internet and my laptop moves a lot so cable is not an option) but I'm not a linux expert (yet).

Any help or advice from anyone more in the know than myself or who may have faced this problem before would be greatly appreciated.

[MauserM98]

Installed Fedora 17 the other day on my laptop.
Wifi was like a limp semi dead horse with pacemaker.
It disconnected all the time.
Solution ..... yum update.
Now I have kernel 3.5 and everything works brilliantly.
I have a Dell XPS 17" i7 6GB Ram etc...

[oystercatcher]

This is what I had to do to get wireless working on a hp laptop with wireless issues.

ASUS 802.11b/g/n Portable Wireless Router (WL-330N)

[Keith Kirk]

I performed a yum update on my system and it's shown no improvement, it still fails to connect and constantly asks me to re-enter the password.

The network manager shows the waiting dots on my network with the phrase "connecting" and then I'll be presented with the "This network requires a key" dialog with the correct password already entered in the entry field. Pressing enter here does nothing but start the "connecting" message and the whole process repeats.

[Keith Kirk]

Found a solution and it seems to work fine (several weeks with no problems). It seems the fault was coming from the default network manager so I've installed Wicd network manager and everything is working fine.