More Ubuntu Wifi Joy

My neighbours are flooding my house with super strength wifi signals. or so it seems. I can't get a reliable signal in the upstairs room where the desktop machine is located. My routers is already set on the "I hate my neighbours, make my signal as loud as possible", setting and that is no longer doing the business.

The obvious solution is to change the channel on which the router is broadcasting. The router I use has an auto setting for this, which I presume means is scans around to find a clear channel and then uses that.

This would be an excellent solution if solving IT problems was completely unlike playing fucking Jenga. Yes, this setting change has fixed the reception problem upstairs, but now the netbook refuses to detect the wifi at all. Fucking spiffing.

This is a driver and software problem. I know this because I can boot to a USB Key, and it works find. I can dual boot to my LFS installation (see posts passim) and that works fine as well. It's just the installed ubuntu that doesn't fucking work. All I did was change the wifi channel for fucks sake. No amount of cursing and swearing appeared to fix this.

I eventually decided to manually install the same network drivers as I have running on the LFS installation. This worked fine. Until the next time I rebooted, when they were overwritten by later drivers, which don't fucking work. I have tried to uninstall the newer drivers, but it's as hard to get rid of the fuckers as it is Michael Meyers. Every time I reboot, the bastards pop into existence once more. Pain in the arse.

(Incidentally the fucking useless drivers, on whatever channel my router is now using because they worked find on the old one, are the broadcom hybrid sta drivers 5.100.something.something. The drivers that actually fucking work are version 5.60.48.36)

All of this explains why I now have a script on my desktop called "get_my_fucking_network_working.sh" which contains the following commands:

cd /tmp
cp '/home/[user]/Dropbox/Essential Drivers/Wireless Drivers/hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5.60.48.36.tar.gz' .
mkdir hybrid_wl 
cd hybrid_wl 
tar -xzvf ../hybrid-portsrc-x86_32-v5.60.48.36.tar.gz
unzip '/home/[user]/Dropbox/Essential Drivers/Wireless Drivers/sta_5.60.48.36_2.6.33_kernel_patch.zip'
patch -p0 < patch
unzip '/home/[user]/Dropbox/Essential Drivers/Wireless Drivers/sta_5.60.48.36_2.6.34_multicast_kernel_patch.zip'
patch -p0 < patch_hybrid_multicast
make clean
make
sudo rmmod b43 
sudo rmmod b44 
sudo rmmod b43legacy
sudo rmmod wl
sudo rmmod ssb 
sudo rmmod ndiswrapper 
sudo rmmod lib80211_crypt_tkip
sudo rmmod lib80211
sudo modprobe lib80211
sudo insmod wl

I have to run this script every time I boot. Joy of all joys.