Really odd problem

[nukedathlonman]

I just got my self a new laptop 3 days ago (Dell Vostro 1720), and I'm working on getting Kubuntu going on it. Up until last night, everything worked out of the box, including the Dell 1510 wireless using the proprietary Broadcom STA driver. With out any warning the wireless connection dropped and every network manager I've tried reports that the interface is disabled. I can't find anyway to re-enable it. The hardware switch on the side is turned on, the driver has loaded up properly, and the wireless works fine when I boot up the Kubuntu live CD for testing. It also works from MEII. I see no error messages in the logs either. But it will not work from my fresh install anymore. I'm totally baffled on why it suddenly stopped working, and wondering if anyone ran into this before or have any idea's where to look.

[dibl]

Don't what happened, but, since it works on the Live CD, can you compare your networking file in the Live CD session with the one on your installed system?

[nukedathlonman]

I checked, and there is no differences in the networking file. So yesterday, I reinstalled and found that the wireless quits working as soon as I enable the nVidia drivers - enabling these drinkings in a couple of packages related to the proprietary nVidia drivers and brings in the DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support) package. I can also confirm this problem isn't Kubuntu specific, it also effects Ubuntu (I just finished trying it out). Once the nVidia display drivers have been enabled, there's no going back - you can disable them and that won't enable the wireless drivers. I'm going to disable them again and remove DKMS to see if that's where the conflict is...

[nukedathlonman]

Nope, DKMS is not what the problem is. Took me 6 more installs and isolating each and every single package update and figured out that is the updated hal package (hal-0.5.12|rc1+git20090403-0ubuntu3 (amd64).

I'll file a bug report, but in the mean time is anyone good at debuging hal?

[dibl]

Interesting.

No, I'm no programmer, but I'm wondering whether there is something specific about your hardware configuration that is involved with the problem. Make sure you give full details (as obtained from hwinfo, for example) on your motherboard/chipset, BIOS, CPU, memory, and connected hardware in your bug report. Also use lsmod and show the installed modules.

Good luck with it!

[nukedathlonman]

Actually I don't need to - some else has filed a bug report, and they have the same make/model laptop. Might be equiped slightly differant (since I specificaly spec'd several options like the nVidia 9600M GS and premium 1920x1200 resolution display), but it's the same Dell Vostro 1720.