Re: nm and wireless

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 19:42 +0200, igel wrote:
> hey everyone,
> is this the right mailing list for support questions regarding
> networkmanager? I'll just assume this for now :]
> 
> So I gave networkmanager a shot and am kinda stuck with my wireless. I
> can't get nm-applet to display the networks in range, even when started
> as root. Maybe I misunderstood the usage of nm-applet but I though it
> would display the available wireless networks on right clicking. I'll
> attach a jpg with what right-clicking the nm-applet produces.
> 
> Currently, I have version 0.8.4 of both networkmanager and nm-applet
> installed. Oh and, in case this is any good: my wired interface works
> with nm (meaning that nm connects if I plug in ethernet (with dhcp))

Only the NM daemon needs to be run as root, to get access to kernel wifi
APIs.  nm-applet should be run as whatever user you're logged in as, and
communicates with the main NM daemon via the D-Bus IPC protocol.  If
you're having problems with wifi, a few questions to narrow it down:

1) does the applet show your wifi device at all, but no networks?  or
does it not even show your wifi?  If the wifi device isn't shown at all,
the contents of /var/log/messages, /var/log/daemon.log,
or /var/log/NetworkManager.log (depending on your distro) are helpful to
figure out what's going on.

2) what distro?  If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, what's in
your /etc/network/interfaces file?  NM is sometimes told to ignore
interfaces that are listed in there, to ensure that when it's installed
it doesn't unexpectedly change your network config.

3) what kernel version and wifi hardware do you have?  Many drivers that
are not stable upstream kernel wifi drivers (ie, anything direct from a
vendor or in the 'staging' kernel drivers) often don't conform to the
standard kernel APIs, and often have small bugs that prevent them from
working smoothly; they simply don't get as much attention as the
standard drivers.  Sometimes a simple fix makes them work, or switching
to a standard kernel driver makes things better.

Dan