WIFI undetected by network manager applet

[MainframeGuy]

This is going to come across as a rather messy long story, I appologise in advance.

I recently acquired an HP2133 netbook. It comes with SUSE 10 enterprise desktop pre-installed. WI-FI was working fine, though a slight pain for asking for the key every time. I thought I would apply all updates I could find and that may improve my networking.... and be generally a good idea.

Having applied all I can find the wi-fi is now broken.

If I use YaST I can see the Broadcom internal device seems to remain recognised, it even has the configuration I set for my wi-fi network access.

The problem seems to be the NetManager applet, which denies all knowledge of wi-fi now and only has wired (which is working).

Ironically the update causing the failure was applied wirelessly.

I am slightly at a loss how best to proceed - I was going to cut my losses and make another boot partition with Ubuntu, but the live CD I made failed to run so that I could make a flash boot version, I shall have to return to that.

I have also now discovered that SUSE 10 is a bit long in the tooth - I sort of assumed it was current, given I bought the machine recently. So I'm wondering if it would be best to take the hit and reformat completely? I know it is broadcom, so should not be a problem, and I have been through ndiswrapper and the like in the past, though somehow I seem to have forgotten all about it now!

I was happy enough with the SUSE setup and this is highly annoying as I was only updating to fix an annoyance and now the wifi has been broken... Perhaps there is an alternative applet to the netmanager that may play with the card and allow me to connect to networks?

I look forward to recommendations, at this time my primary objective is to restore wifi functionality, longer term perhaps I need to review distro and installation, but I should like to do that on a dual boot basis I think

[hlrguy]

I had a discussion on this at ZDNet a while back. Suse broke NetApplet with some of their KDE packages. In my case, even when seen, I could not connect to the network with the new netapp since it mandated root permission. This was on a live CD on my netbook. The way I worked around it, in Yast, under network config, you should get a warning something like "Network is controlled by NetApp and cant' be configured using Yast, please select legacy ifdown/ifup to configure your network using Yast".

I did this, there is an option on one of the tabs, and poof, was able to configure my network easily, however, there was no netapplet and you would/will have to open Yast every time you want to connect to a WiFi network and you don't get the docked applet showing you are connected.

This was on the KDE 4.2 demo version that is based on Suse. The bottom line, I went immediately back to Mandriva (with KDE 4.1) and decided to wait on Mandriva 2009.1 official with KDE 4.2.

The above is not exactly what you have, but the root cause appears to be the same, some KDE packages broke netApplet (by inclusion in the KDE 4.2 demo cd and possibly by you grabbing same from Suse).

A couple of links with what I suspect is the root cause.
http://forum.sabayonlinux.org/viewto...p?f=52&t=16007
http://www.nabble.com/kwallet---nm-a...d22041929.html

Maybe something to try from first link?
The package networkmanager-0.7.0 is masked in Portage, and does not work either on my laptop. I just downgraded to networkmanager-0.6.6-r1 and wired and wireless networking work fine again.

I think I did try using the KDE 3.5 version of NetApp after turning off NetworkApplication control, but at that point (this was a live CD trial), I just decided to forget it.

hlrguy

[MainframeGuy]

Another comprehensive reply! I'm guessing you must also be a 2133 owner

Many thanks for that, I'm puzzled that I'm running gnome, but undoubtedly the KDE rollout is what broke netmanager....

Being a mobile device wifi is crucial to it's usefulness, no matter how many unterminated CAT5's I seem to have around the house! Unfortunately I have been unable so far to even get wifi working with ifdown/ifup

I've diverted myself with trying to get a distro to install as a dual boot, but failed on that also (Ubuntu live CD would not play ball and Puppy produced a bad boot flash). Talking with a friend I believe these mobile processors (in this case VIA C7) have reduced *86 instruction sets and are forced to run a different kernel and a sort of VM environment, no doubt making the CPU seem even more puny than it is - I may make another thread about that. I was wondering how that impacted boot flash and my problems.

Anyway - more or less decided to explore returning this device in favour of spending for an eee or somesuch. If that is tricky in some way (and I bought brand new from large retailer who more or less mentioned there may be a two week "cooling off allowance) then I'll order the recover DVD that HP should ship I have read if you ask in the first 30 days, hopefully from that I can get back to the original config and live with the annoyance of repeat passcode entry.

Anyone know a way I could download an RPM to downgrade to the old netmanager? There's a lot of dependency - I have managed to delete the new one (since it did not work I do not care) in an attempt at this already where I overrode the dependency resolutions with delete...

Anyone chancing on this thread with recommendations in the netbook arena please let me know too - I'm hopeful that returning should be an option. I wonder if there are any netbooks out there capable enough to cope with video play (albeit at low res.)?

[hlrguy]

Hi again,

Actually, I have an Acer Aspire One, but came across the networkApplication failure when testing the live demo KDE 4.2 (based on Suse). I found it strange that they would include a broken NetworkApplication. In trying to figure it out, I found out all that I had found above.

I found yet another link outlining exactly similar
http://hpmininotepc.com/2008/04/29/d...nt-my-opinion/
and I think (especially with the new push for HP's MEI, the Suse support is probably a dead end)

All that said, I do think returning it and/or putting something else on it is the way to move forward. Ubuntu 8.04LTS should be a "just works" proposition with one tweak to the video mode.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/HP2133

Here is one for Ubuntu 8.10.
http://extelopedia.wordpress.com/hp-2133/

Now, for me, with the Acer Aspire One, Ubuntu and Fedora and OpenSuse were perfect with Live CD. I went back to my old friend Mandriva, and am typing this on it now.
http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=75244

For me (known issue) the SD card readers don't work due to a kernel problem in 2009.0 (not sure if fixed in the new beta) and I have not got the webcam working with Kopete (and haven't troubleshot it because I never have used one). It was and is a truly great experience with KDE 4.1. Wireless, as you point out, is the whole point and have never had a lick of trouble with it.

Here's a howto on Fedora 10. Not completely turn key, but not bad at all.
http://hp2133.umsw.de/

It is a shame that, as I have read a hundred times, "HP slapped a stock SLED install on, called it good and shipped it out". Users are generally on their own.

So, my vote is Mandriva (they have put a lot into making netbooks seamless) or Ubuntu (wonder what was up with your live CD, it should work via the links above). Kind of makes me want to have your computer in front of me to troubleshoot it.

hlrguy

[MainframeGuy]

just as a postscript to this thread - I did indeed return the netbook, esp. since the price had dropped a further £20 since my purchase!

BUT before doing so I went through the protocol to get the recovery DVD - so if anyone googles to this thread with similar problem to mine and wishes to go through restore palaver - contact me to get the DVD a little faster than HP ship it!

I have just won an Ebay on an Elonex OneT for a littl eunder half the price (£89) and have great trepidation about how it may suffer by comparison... but at least it was a LOT less to layout....

BIG thankyou to you HLR for all the help though.

[hlrguy]

Not a problem. I hope it works out much much better than the first go round.

hlrguy