[Solved] Wireless stopped working

[Shining Arcanine]

I had wireless working with KNetworkManager under KDE 4.4.3 without issues until today when I decided to repartition my hard drive because I discovered that my partitions were not properly aligned. I made a tarball of all of my system's files on an external disk (using a exclusion file to omit directories like /dev and /proc). I then proceeded with a System Rescue CD to repartition my disk to correct the alignment, format the new partitions, reinstall grub and reboot my PC.

After rebooting, everything was working except for the wireless, which inexplicably stopped detecting wireless networks. I spent a few hours troubleshooting and discovered that the NetworkManager daemon was hanging waiting for wpa_supplicant to start, which was failing to start because it could not find /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. I had reinstalled wpa_supplicant several times over the course of my troubleshooting and I had no idea how that file could be missing, so I ran touch /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to try to make wpa_supplicant happy. Wireless was still not working, but then I tried running wpa_supplicant -B -u as root and then my wireless connection magically started working.

Now I have to run wpa_supplicant -B -u at every boot if I want to have a wireless connection. I have no idea why I did not have to do this before I reformatted my hard drive, but regardless of why I have to do it now, does anyone know how to fix this so things work automatically without me having to run wpa_supplicant -B -u to get wireless working?

[Shining Arcanine]

I do not understand how this issue was triggered in the first place, but it is fixed. I found a bug report describing my issue and it said that recompiling dbus would fix it, which worked perfectly:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/212724

I assume that the issue had to do with timestamps. I am going to rollback the changes I made to configuration files to see if they were necessary.

[Randy Andy]

Hi Shining Arcanine,

and all who had trouble with knetworkmanager stops working after some package updates, as it happened on my machine last weekend.
Since this, the knetworkmanager applet shows unmanaged (in a weak grey box), when clicking on it.

Into my emerge.log i can't find any new packages that has to do with knetworkmanager or one of it's dependencies, but before this update my knetworkmanager worked well - finally.

So i'm searching around in the forum, and tried every hint i could find, including the one of the bug report you gave, but nothing works.

I did, step by step, remerging dbus, i used the masked version, so i downgraded to the latest stable version, then remerging every package that depends on dbus, remerging hal without -consolekit - policykit USE Flag - all without success. So i have undone my changes and try something different.


The solution was, deleting this file: