Both Jennifer and I have had a problem with our laptops for a long time where wireless does not always get reinitialized when our computers come back from standby. On Friday, we ran into this same problem with a work laptop. All three are Dells, but they are very different machines: a 3-year-old Inspiron 5150, a new-ish Inspiron 9400 (my baby), and a brand new Latitude D620. In every case, this little script helps:

#!/bin/bash

# Pick the right kernel module for the hardware here
sudo rmmod ipw3945
sudo modprobe ipw3945 ieee80211
killall nm-applet
nohup nm-applet 2>&1 > /dev/null &

This solves two different problems. First, sometimes the wireless fails to show up as wireless - that’s what removing and reinstalling the kernel module does. Secondly, even when the wireless interface is available, sometimes the NetworkManager applet drops the ball and won’t recognize it. A restart of the applet fixes that problem. Hopefully someone else will find this little script useful too.

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