[Solved - mostly] Wireless Woes

[angry_arctic_avian]

When I first installed Gentoo onto my notebook, I had no trouble getting connected to my home network using wpa_supplicant. Yet, whenever I tried to connect to another wireless access point, I would not even associate any other router. I emerged wicd, at the suggestion of someone from the #gentoo IRC channel, yet wicd tends to crash whenever I try to configure or connect to the wireless connection. It has even caused my system to freeze (an occurrence that is rare from my experience with Linux) when I have attempted to get the wireless to work. I have installed wicd to use the ncurses interface to keep my notebook desktop environment minimal. Also, even though I have removed net.eth0, net.wlan0 and wpa_supplicant from starting at boot, each of these processes start up anyway. Even preventing these processes from starting at boot, I still cannot associate with the router on my home network. Here is the output from wicd after it exits upon trying to configure or connect to the router:

[wrc1944]

Are you sure "rc-update show" has ONLY net.lo and no net.eth or net.wlan loading?

On some systems wicd likes to be at the boot run level. NetworkManager works good at default run level. Wicd or NetworkManager needs to control everything, and you should use one or the other, and just to be sure "emerge C" the one you don't use, and finally manually remove (if any) leftover directories/files that belonged to the removed package.

Are you sure there are no net.eth, net.ath, or net.wlan symlinks pointing to net.lo in /etc/init.d/? There should be none of these present for wicd or NetworkManager to function correctly.

To make absolutely sure nothing tries to load, in /etc/rc.conf you should have something like the line: RC_PLUG_SERVICES="!net.wlan* !net.*"

Also, your /etc/conf.d/net file should have no left-over config lines from other service, or any manual attempts to configure wired or wireless connections. Start with a blank net file if in doubt.

Again, wicd needs to control everything.
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

[angry_arctic_avian]

I had to unmerge wicd, since it was causing my system to hang whenever I tried to configure or connect to the wireless AP, or whenever wicd was being closed during the shutdown process. I tried starting wicd in both default and boot run levels, yet it would not associate with the access point, and it would cause the system to hang during the aforementioned processes. Now my system shutdowns without hanging. I have since been able to connect with the wireless AP using wpa_supplicant. ls -alht did show net.wlan0 and net.eth0 symlinked to net.lo. I'll have to remove the symlinks when I try Networkmanager. I had already added those arguments in rc.conf as instructed by the portage message I got from emerging wicd. I'll update this post after experimenting with Networkmanager. I'm hoping that I will be able to run it from the command line for the sake of keeping my desktop environment minimalistic.

[wrc1944]

Sorry- forgot to mention this before. Recently there was a known problem with wicd and openrc updates breaking things. What wicd version were you working with? Maybe that's the problem in your case. IIRC, it was fixed in the latest ~Arch wicd version.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405775
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

[angry_arctic_avian]

Didn't really think anything about the release number even though I noticed it looked unusual from most package atoms.

[wrc1944]

I think 1.7.1-rc3 has the fix for the new openrc version. I do recall I was having those same type wicd hangs on shutdown prior to the r8712u patches from Larry.

With the wicd/openrc problem thrown into the mix along with the r8712u staging driver it's become pretty confusing.

If I was going to use a 3.2.x kernel for anything, I'd just copy over a kernel source 3.1.x /staging/rtl8712 directory to the 3.2.x kernel source staging directory, replacing the default 3.2 version, and then compile my kernel and modules.
EDIT: Better yet, unless it's back-ported I should actually use the rtl8712 directory from the linux-next kernel source I downloaded from git for my 3.3.x kernels- don't know why I didn't realize that before.

I did that at least 50 times when using all 3.2-rc's, 3.2.x's, and 3.3-rc's and 3.3.0 on several different distros, and it never failed once to resolve all r8712u issues immediately. Plus, it's simpler that having to do several patches, and then manually fixing a few rejects that did occur. I'll be doing this on all my 3.3.x's, unless the fix from linux-next and hopefully 3.4-rc's is back-ported to 3.3.

The openrc/wicd problem is a different matter, and as mentioned is apparently fixed in 1.7.1-rc3 for the new openrc, I guess incorporating something like the /etc/conf.d/wicd fix mentioned toward the end of the bug report. If you don't want to go to 1.7.1-r3, you could do the manual edit instead- should work OK.
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

[angry_arctic_avian]

After adding