The next chapter in wireless problems: difference between Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10?

[Don Levey]

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Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 16:23 -0500, Don Levey wrote:
>>> NetworkManager in F9 and later has always Just Worked for me to
>>> connect to damn near every base station I've come across. There
>>> *might* be something amiss with the initial F9 version, not sure.
>>> Current rawhide definitely works flawlessly though, on multiple
>>> systems here, with multiple base stations, with different ranges of
>>> speeds, encryption methods, etc.
>>>
>> OK, I'll check from the base LiveCD to see if I've just messed
>> something up...
> 
> I'd suggest perhaps even the F10 beta live cd, if the f9 one has
> issues...
> 
>>> Also, the wifi card in use here could be relevant...
>>>
>> It's a built-in 802.11a/b/g card in my Acer laptop.  It identifies in
>> Network Settings as Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG.
> 
> Yeah, that should definitely be working... Assuming the iwl3945-firmware
> package is installed, that is -- its on the live CDs, but is it possible
> your non-working install is missing it?
> 

OK, this gets a bit weirder.

Last night I was able to confirm that the Fedora 9 LiveCD (KDE version)
would indeed access and use the wireless card in the laptop, as I
happily surfed away for about an hour while watching TV.  So far so good.

I then tried to boot up again and try it from the hard drive.  I've been
using Enlightenment recently, but figured that I'd play it safe and boot
into KDE to make sure I had access to the applet.  I got what ended up
being a permissions error on .ICEauthority (being owned by root - but
I'm not using ICWwm so what gives?), so instead I logged in as a test
user I had created previously.  The Network Manager applet was there on
the tack bar, I was able to configure this connection, set up what
appeared to be a global keyring for the machine, and was able to connect
under this new user.  So now I know that the Fedora installation I have
is OK, and it's a problem with the one main user.

I tried to re-login as myself after changing the ownership of that
.ICEauthority file, and was again successful in connecting via wireless.
 "Oh," said I, "it may be that the connection is persisting across the
user logins, since I did a simple logout and not a restart.  I therefore
did a full restart of the machine.

When I logged in again as myself (into KDE) I tried to connect via the
Network Manager applet.  However, even though it saw the
previously-configured connection (and I was asked for the password) it
refused to connect.  Instead I was continually prompted for the WPA
password.

Clearly this is a user-level problem; I tried to look at the contents of
the test user home directory to see if I could discern the config file
it might be using (with no success).  I check in the /etc/NetworkManager
directory, but see nothing that would seem to be a user-by-user
configuration.  In three weeks my intent is to install Fedora 10 over
the current installation (not an upgrade) but leave my home directory
behind.  If there's something in that directory, though, that controls
the user-level Network Manager configuration that'll still be coming
along for the ride.

Any thoughts?

 -Don
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