Wireless Network 'disabled'?

[EnthusOcn]

My upgrade went fine. But a friend of mine who has been using KDE4 for a while upgraded to the new Kubuntu with KDE 4 and her wireless isn't working:

My system tray [had] no battery monitor or network monitor... I added one via the add widgets.... And it's showing my network here, but it says disabled... I added the passphrase, but nothing happens....

Since it shows the network I assume this means that the hardware is installed just fine. I've seen lots of people talking about wicd. I don't know what that is, but I assume that this problem is not related.

She'll be dropping off her laptop here tonight. Any insight why it would be disabled? I have never seen this. If it's covered in this forum just give me a keyword. None of the threads since the Jaunty Jackalope hopped out of Connical have talked about this issue.

[flarson]

Re: Wireless Network 'disabled'?

The relationship to wicd is that this has happened so many times that many of us use wicd instead. It is more reliable.

[Teunis]

Re: Wireless Network 'disabled'?

wicd is 'just' one of the available front ends for managing the network.

And experience shows it often works where KNetworkManager fails.
It's especially better when you need to use WPA encryption.

Please note network-manager needs to be uninstalled before wicd can be installed.
So download it before you loose your network.

The Gnome nm-applet is another one that often works with network-manager.

[flarson]

Re: Wireless Network 'disabled'?

Please note network-manager needs to be uninstalled before wicd can be installed.
So download it before you loose your network.

While not incorrect that statement is misleading. If a person has a wireless connection working using network-manager and they run
sudo aptitude install wicd
The installation procedure will download all packages before it begins to install and uninstall software, so there are no problems a user will notice.

If network-manager worked though, they would not be asking, unless they had figured out that network-manager will not load a wireless connection until the user logs in, no matter which applet you run.

[Teunis]

Re: Wireless Network 'disabled'?

I agree this should be handled by the package manager, it did for me in the previous distributions but has (for me) not worked in 9.04, I was afraid this would be a distribution problem.

That's why I suggested to get the deb before it's too late...
You might have read I took the wicd deb from sourceforge, not realising it's now in the repositories, maybe they're differently packed?

Some of us hook up to a cable when wifi problems occur

[flarson]

Re: Wireless Network 'disabled'?

An ethernet is indispensable for me, and wireless a fun toy. The use of sourceforge throws any number of variables into this that I will not try to guess at. The place your advice would be real valuable is before a wireless only user upgrades to 9.04. That seems to break many wireless connections and leave them without a network to get wicd. If those people had know in advance that the upgrade would blow it they could have run
aptitude download wicd
(with jaunty repositories) and had wicd on their system. Hopefully wicd will be part of KDE 4.3 and this will never come up again.