Arch Linux

mikesoylu

Member

Registered: 2011-04-01

Posts: 4

Wi-Fi unable to connect

Hello everyone!
I've been using Arch for about a month now and by far everything's been pretty smooth.. I'm lovin' it

I've got networkmanager and network-manager-applet installed with gnome and working %100 on lan, but some wireless connections are being problematic.
At school, our main campus connection comes and goes on Arch, while the connection on my windoze is stable and today I couldn't connect to the wireless at my friends house (he uses debian so I copied his dns and password settings on network-manager-applet, so I'm sure it's not the password or anything). But I have no problem with the connection at our faculty or my house.. It's really wierd; I can see the available networks listed but I can't connect.

My wlan is Intel WiFi Link 5100 and I'm sure my wireless is turned on

thanks.

whatshisname

Member

Registered: 2010-04-24

Posts: 163

Re: Wi-Fi unable to connect

Sounds like the problem I used to have.

Get rid of network-manager:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=107609

mikesoylu

Member

Registered: 2011-04-01

Posts: 4

Re: Wi-Fi unable to connect

ok I'll try wicd once I get a connection.

whatshisname

Member

Registered: 2010-04-24

Posts: 163

Re: Wi-Fi unable to connect

I forgot to mention one other thing you could try.

The one good thing that came from the trials and tribulations with my wireless connection is that I came to understand just what these network managers, like Wicd, actually do.

1st - they bring up your network interface.
2nd - they look for routers in range.
3rd - they get an IP address from it.

You can do this from the command line yourself thus skipping the need to rely on programs like Wicd and such.   If you use your laptop in only a few given places, you can create a script for each location.  I use mine mostly at home so I call mine from /etc/rc.local.

Here's what my "chome" script looks like:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Bring up eth1"
ifconfig eth1 up
echo "Associate with MyRouter"
iwconfig eth1 essid MyRouter
echo "Get IP address"
dhclient eth1

I had some problems with dhcpcd while wrangling with my wireless connection  and at one point switched to dhclient.  YMMV.

Moral of the story is I now understand the three steps involved in getting a connection to the Internet and have found this knowledge useful even on my workstation at school which sometimes reboots without a valid connection.  Instead of wondering what's going wrong, I now know.  If my interface is up and "ifconfig eth0" shows no IP address, I know all I need to do is ask for an ipaddress with "dhclient eth0".  ("eth0" being my  lan connection at school.)

It's the Arch way!

joseperezc

Member

Registered: 2011-03-02

Posts: 80

Re: Wi-Fi unable to connect

sometimes the configs in network manager becomes corrupt
in my case this ussualy happened once a month when i used ubuntu -LOL-
so i just open edit conections and delete all conections, disable and enable, and try to conect again, write the password and thats it. it works again

---

Hope to be helpfull

mikesoylu

Member

Registered: 2011-04-01

Posts: 4

Re: Wi-Fi unable to connect

I got the pkg.xz's from the db and got wicd up and running with networkmanager disabled, but it also has the same problem .. So I'll try your way whatshisname. Though I'm getting the feeling it's not the managers but the driver not working..