[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#673705: Bug#673705: Bug#673705: Bug#673705: network-manager: Network Manager doesn't connect to wifi (greyed out) when device cannot report signal strength

[Dan Williams]

On Mon, 2012-05-21 at 23:28 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> tags 673705 + patch
> severity 673705 important
> thanks
> 
> On 21.05.2012 18:34, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Mon, 2012-05-21 at 11:07 +0200, Gennady N. Uraltsev wrote:
> >> Sorry for the ambiguity. I filed a bug against the kernel in Debian
> >> about this problem. Here it is:
> >>
> >> 673703: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=673703
> >>
> >> Anyhow they said it was a hardware/firmware issue and that they wouldn't
> >> fix it themselves. They forwarded the issue upstream, to
> >> linux-wireless.
> > 
> > Two bugs here: first the ipw2x00 kernel issues that got fixed recently;
> > one is the encryption capabilities issue that causes the grayed out menu
> > items.  The other bug is an NM bug, fixed by:
> > 
> > http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=50435e1d5deff17233f1de73ee030a5982e9fd05
> > 
> > which should be a safe backport.  The NM fix is really the correct fix
> > until the ipw2x00 driver gets ported to cfg80211 in the kernel.  It's
> > 10%  of the way there, which is what was confusing NM.
> 
> Thanks a lot Dan for this very helpful reply.
> So if I understood you correctly, simply cherry-picking 50435e1d should
> be enough to make NM work for Gennady, i.e. it doesn't require the
> kernel fix (because we would continue to use wext for ipw2x00). And the
> kernel patch is about making ipw2x00 work correctly via nl80211?

Correct on the NM part; incorrect on the ipw2x00 part.  The kernel fix
is necessary, but that still doesn't make ipw2x00 work with nl80211.
Turns out that ipw2x00 only advertises it's capabilities via nl80211,
but it doesn't actually support anything in nl80211, like signal
strength, associated channel and AP, connect, disconnect, etc.  So until
somebody does some major nl80211 work on ipw2x00, we have to keep using
WEXT to ask for that stuff.

Dan