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When I wake up my laptop (Ubuntu 10.04) from suspension, it does not recognize the available wireless networks. The only way to refresh the list is to disable wireless networking, and than enable it.

Any idea how to force a refresh on the list of wireless networks?

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  • All wireless cards are not equal. Depends on the wireless card. Which one do you have?
    – user4124
    Jan 27, 2011 at 21:21

1 Answer 1

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The best way to refresh the list is to go to the command line and type:

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

Assuming your wifi is called wlan0 (it might be wlan0 or something else) see ifconfig for details.

On newer versions of Ubuntu you can leave out the wifi name and it will scan all wireless cards:

sudo iwlist scan

This command will refresh the list by asking the wifi to rescan. You can only do this as root and if you do it as non-root it will simply print the list of known networks without refreshing.

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  • That didn't make the system toolbar work again. It still shows 0 networks in the GUI.
    – Chloe
    Feb 12, 2017 at 21:02
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    Mine used to give some problem time to time. I used sudo iwlist scan on Ubuntu 16. It worked. Available Wifi got listed. Thsi saved me restart. Mar 4, 2017 at 5:37

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