I've searched the ubuntu forums and there's a few posts about people losing wireless connection but I couldn't find anything to help my situation so I thought I'd post here.

Basically the fit-pc2 loses wireless connection and then can't rediscover the network and reconnect automatically. If I manually reboot it reconnects to wireless immediately.

This event may somehow coincide with automatic system updates because when it happens, the package manager is up and prompting to download and install updates.

Any ideas?

6 months later ... and still experiencing wireless drop-outs and inability to reconnect. Ubuntu 9.10.

Any help appreciated.

Does it lose wireless spontaneously?

I had a similar problem - whenever my wireless router hung and had to be restarted, my FitPC2 refused to reconnect automatically. In the end, I threw together a crude cron job that every ten minutes checks if the the network is unreachable and in that case stops the network-manager, ifdown:s wlan0, unloads the wireless module (rt3090sta), sleeps for a while (30s), reloads the module, ifup:s wlan0, and restarts the network-manager.

I am sure that it could be improved a lot but it has worked well. My old Netgear wireless router can act up as much as it wants without me having to manually get the FitPC to reconnect.

Thanks for the reply. I'm far from a linux guru. I've setup basic cron jobs to run php scripts etc but can you please provide details of this "crude cron job" of yours so that I can try it myself?

Thanks for that. I got the cron job going and the script was executing and logging, but still wasn't successfully re-establishing lost wifi connections.

So I did a bit more Googling and found WICD which replaces the network manager and seems to work perfectly, re-establishing lost connections immediately.