hi—using opensuse 11.4 on laptop–we went down the shore and I added a bunch of wireless connections and it was working down there, but now we came back and I deleted all of them except my wireless network connection. I’m not sure if anything else was messed with as others were using this laptop.
When I start up the networking icon says Unavailable…when I click on it greyed out is “Network Management disabled” and “Enable wireless”
The Wireless light on the laptop is a solid orange. When it is working it is flashing.
What do I do to troubleshoot this? I am fairly noobish to linux. Thanks.
If you want to remove all previous configurations, including saved in KWALLET, you can use the following procedure.
You would open a terminal session and execute the following commands one at a time:
sudo /etc/init.d/network stop
sudo killall -9 kwalletemanager
sudo killall -9 knetworkmanager
rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/config/networkmanagementrc
rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/apps/networkmanagement
rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/config/kwalletrc
rm -rf ~/.kde4/share/apps/kwallet
You should reboot your computer when complete, then…
Load Required Programs using: YaST for KNetworkManager & KDE menu for Kwallet
You Must run: YaST / Network Devices / Network Settings / Global Options Tab and select the bullet option for: User Controlled with NetworkManager. To use Kwallet open: KDE Menu / System / Desktop Applet / KwalletManager.
If You have never got your wireless connection working using the ‘Traditional Method with ifup’, it is very likely this will not help you out. Make sure that your wireless hardware is working first. If you have had your wireless hardware working, use KDE and now it does not work, the above procedure should work for you.
Thank You,
I did all that–when i reboot the network icon in the tray says “unavailable”. when I click on it “Enable networking” is checked off but the “Enable wireless” is greyed out. The wireless light/switch on the laptop is a solid orange–i try to press on it to turn it on but it stays solid orange. so it seems like my wireless device is not activated and/or turned on?? but it was all working perfectly previously.
Hmmm… I’m wondering if your wireless device has been disabled for some reason. My work laptop had a similar issue when I was dual booting with Windows XP. (In my case, the Windows wireless management utility was shutting the interface down, leaving it unavailable to Linux). You can use the rfkill utility to check (and set) the desired status.
Open a terminal, and become root with
su -
Then type
rfkill list
Is your wireless enabled?
You can unblock (if necessary) with 'rfkill unblock ', for example
rfkill unblock 2
Thank you. How do I know the device number of my wireless device?
I am not sure rfkill is installed by default or just how to use this package deano_ferrari even after you install it.
Thank You,
Yes rfkill must not be installed–I can’t get online to install it but I found it here:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=rfkill&project=openSUSE%3A11.4
as a tar file. I moved that over to the laptop but don’t know how to install it with that.
now its working—i didn’t install/use the rfkill. i tried the script mentioned on the sticky:
collectNWData
but that was purely for diagnostics–it didnt change anything i dont think.
and as I was fuddling around trying to make sense of the errors I suddenly noticed the wireless light on the laptop was blue—so i would then enable wireless networking and connected to my network and all is fine.
So whatever you had me do there worked even though at first it didnt seem to work–so thank you!
the question is, what the heck happened to allow the light to turn on?
now its working—i didn’t install/use the rfkill. i tried the script mentioned on the sticky:
collectNWData
but that was purely for diagnostics–it didn’t change anything i don’t think.
and as I was fuddling around trying to make sense of the errors I suddenly noticed the wireless light on the laptop was blue—so i would then enable wireless networking and connected to my network and all is fine.
So whatever you had me do there worked even though at first it didn’t seem to work–so thank you!
the question is, what the heck happened to allow the light to turn on?
Thanks for the link to the new network test script, I will see what it offers in the way of help. As for your setup, I can only ask if you did a full reboot after making the suggested changes? If not, perhaps later doing a reboot did the trick. However, it is hard to say for sure and in any event, I love to hear about success, no matter how it might have occurred.
Thank You,