[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#456310: network manager returns "no network device has been found" after last hal-info upgrade

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Package: hal-info
Version: 20071212-1
Severity: grave

After the last upgrade of hal-info, network manager fails to find any
network device only reporting the error message mentioned in the subject
("no network device has been found") when clicking on the ex nm-applet
icon. (Note that this happens even with the network device not being
mentioned in /etc/network/interfaces as required by network-manager.)

Downgrading hal-info to the testing version (20071030-1) fixes the
problem.

I presume (though I haven't checked) that for finding the network
interfaces which are not listed in /etc/network/interfaces to be
managed, network manager does some lookup via hal, which fails due to
some hal-info breakage.  Hence, I think that the other way of using
network-manager via /etc/network/interfaces suggested in
/usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian (namely, to list the
desired interfaces as "auto" and with "dhcp") works, but I haven't tried
that.

My (wireless) network card is an Intel as described below by lspci:

  06:05.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2702
        Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
        Latency: 32 (750ns min, 6000ns max), Cache Line Size: 32 bytes
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 20
        Region 0: Memory at b0204000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>

and works properly (without network-manager / hal) with the ipw2200
kernel module.

Severity grave since I bet other people with the same Intel card will
have a network shortage upon installing the current package version.

Thanks in advance,
Cheers.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash