Network Manager Broken?

English Applications
1

Running OpenSuse 11.1/KDE4, internal Atheros 242 (ath5k) and D-link usb (rt73usb) wireless cards. Drivers installed, recognized and working (under ifup).

Network manager won’t let me choose wireless connections, which work fine under ifup - NM shows connections but when I click one it is unresponsive and won’t connect. Under Network Settings (switching to ifup), it’ll scan and let me choose available networks, however when I choose user controlled through network manager, it stalls on “activate network settings” with the error “no network running”. If I change back to ifup, it works. Wired works without issue.

Wifimanager shows a connection and will scan wireless connections, and the led’s on my wireless card seem to respond to network traffic, however there’s no connection as Firefox, etc., won’t load anything. Sysinfo reports “unknown connection”.

Iwconfig also shows that everything is working fine - wlan0 and wlan1 loaded and operational.

I uninstalled and reinstalled networkmanager to no avail, it still seems to hang when I choose a wireless connection.

Important that I get networkmanager running as I frequently connect to open wireless networks at my office.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

2

Been a reoccurring issue for me, with both the gnome and kde3 network managers.

You could try wicd as an alternative… I’m too much of a nub to ever have gotten it to work though.
Or you could try the KDE4 network manager, which did always detect networks reliably for me, but had other issues… it’s in development and it was long time ago I tested it though, so might work nicely nowadays.

3

Hi,

What I used to do while KDE was on my machine is:

Pre: Add the wireless network.

1.-Change to offline mode.
2.-Go back to online mode again.
3.-Edit connection (in case you have more than 1).
4.-Click Save and Connect.

That worked for me. Sometimes it took just too long, and I turned the wireless off and on, and tried again.

On GNOME it works better, maybe they have different drivers or applet. Don’t know.

Regards.

4

mmh just installed wicd (there is a one click install up on webpin) and although it sees all networks… it seems to get stuck on “NETGEAR: Generating WPA configuration file…”
NETGEAR is an unsecured network, and not one I want to connect to.

Bit silly, as apart from that it looks like something that could work.

5

For s’s and g’s, I’ll take a look at it.

NM was irreparably broken, did a new install and swore to myself I wouldn’t mess it up again. One of the biggest mistakes we all make is updating when there’s little to no need to do so. You know the old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I did find an entry in dmesg that showed the system had deinitialized both drivers after loading them - so, if you NM isn’t working, type dmesg in terminal and look for an obvious error (reason 3?).