Ubuntu 16.04 on Surface Book - Wireless internet disconnects randomly until restart
I have dual-booted Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and Windows 10 on my Surface Book, and on the Windows side I have no issues with the wireless internet at my work office. On my Ubuntu partition, it seems that sometimes when I switch access points, my wireless internet gets disconnected and is not able to connect to the same network or any other network until I restart my computer. This issue also occurs even when I haven't switched wireless access points. It's not consistent at all.
I've tried the solutions posted here, here, and here without any luck. This is a rather frustrating issue because the restart disrupts my workflow, as you can imagine.
I've looked at several other questions and tried their solutions without any luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Here is a link to my wireless-info.txt
: https://ufile.io/abkfd
Update (February 9, 2018):
I'm not sure what changed, but a few weeks ago, my wireless internet stopped disconnecting when I switch access points! It's likely that one of the updates in the Software Updater fixed my internet issues.
Unfortunately, I don't have more details on the fix, but for all those running Ubuntu on their Surface Book devices, try installing the latest updates using the Software Updater!
Update (June 4, 2018):
I ran into this issue again after reformatting my computer a couple of months ago and have tried patching the kernel to 4.13 with no luck. My internet kept disconnecting, and my wireless bluetooth headphones couldn't connect effectively either.
I felt like I should upgrade the kernel to 4.15, but I needed to update OpenSSL. Instead of doing that manually, I decided to take the risk and upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04. Both of my problems were fixed by upgrading! My internet has been working wonderfully so far, and my bluetooth headphones are also perfectly functional.
I didn't have anything to lose if the upgrade didn't work and I had to reformat my computer again, so while I would recommend this route, be careful as the upgrade directly to Ubuntu 18.04 from 16.04 allegedly won't be officially supported until late July 2018.
I also finally ran out of patience a couple of days ago after passively tolerating the same problem for a while.
I know disabling power management is one of the suggestions you linked to having unsuccessfully tried, but it seems to be working for me so far (at least as a way of avoiding the actual bug while its cause is unclear)...
I've disabled it through editing /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
because all the /etc/pm
stuff no longer works. systemd (which is now in charge of power management) ignores it (although the files are all still there from several packages 🙄) -- did you do the same? NetworkMangler now seems to be the thing which best takes precedence over everything else for this setting (based on some half-arsed experimentation).
Running iwconfig
consistently yields Power management:off
which confirms the change has at least taken effect.
Note for passers-by on the setting I'm talking about: in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf
. I changed wifi.powersave = 3
to 2. 3 means enabled. 2 means disabled. 0 and 1 are "set to default" and "do nothing". This isn't really documented. My source was a random gist.
That said, I've not lived with it for that long (just a couple of days) so it's possible this hasn't actually resolved anything. I'll check back in here if it hasn't. Best of luck!