Comment 19 for bug 62685

The problem is that (at least on my system) hostap_pci, prism2_pci, and orinoco_pci are all loaded (by udev or hotplug or discover or whatever is detecting hardware and loading drivers these days) and attempt to control my hardware. In previous releases, prism2_pci wasn't built, so there was only a conflict between hostap_pci and orinoco_pci. I believe the hostap driver was coded so that it would back off and let orinoco_pci handle the hardware, or at any rate, this case as solved.

In edgy, the prism2_pci driver is now being built. It thinks it can handle my hardware, but it can't. What's more, when it is loaded by udev/hotplug, it prevents the orinoco_pci from taking control, so wireless doesn't work unless I either manually unload all the drivers and reload the orinoco_pci driver, or unless I tell udev/hotplug not to load prism2_pci driver via a blacklist file entry.

I think a lot of middle-aged laptops (Thinkpad T30 and others from the ~2002 timeframe) used similar minipci hardware. Unless the users know about this bug, they'll probably assume Ubuntu no longer supports it.

Too bad this had to be pushed to the edgy-updates (though I understand the time constraints), because there will be a class of users that install edgy and may not be able to connect to the net (wirelessly) to get the update without config file tweaking.

Still, thanks for looking at this Colin.