For some reason wlan0 is not fully activated when my system boots up. It's a Broadcom 4310 running via ndiswrapper.

KNetworkManager lists all available wifi networks, so the thing is clearly working. But it won't actually connect to one. It gets to 28% 'Configuring Device' and just stops.

KWifiManager on the other hand, will connect. I select a network, give it the root password, and all's well. After this, KNetworkManager also works normally. So clearly KWifiManager is doing some final stage of activation.

So my question is, does anyone know what that extra activation step that wifimgr does is? And how I might go about doing that from a script that runs a boot time?

Thanks.

What type of encryption are you using. If it is wpa-psk, you could run as root:
wpa_cli [-p<path to ctrl sockets>] [-i<ifname>]
On my system, this would be
sudo wpa_cli -p/var/run/wpa_supplicant -iwlan0

From the cli you can monitor the association process, or scan for networks and try to reassociate manually. It might give a clue what the problem is, but my guess is that you need to check the values for ssid or that the key matches the APs key.

thanks for the quick reply.

It's actually an unsecured network. no WPA or encryption or anything. We haven't even gotten around to changing the ssid from the default 'linksys'. I know, it's a bad idea, but it's my housemate's thing, and he's repsonsible for it.

anyway, I'll give your suggestion a look. thanks.

I'm not familiar with your distribution. In suse, you can configure the device in YaST. This creates the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0 which defines variable values used by the startup scripts ifup-wlan0, etal, that SuSE runs. You may want to find a similar program or file, because I think that there is entry that is off. Given that you aren't using encryption, you might try using iwconfig to manually set the essid, frequency and other variables to match the network. You can get this information from "sudo /usr/sbin/iwlist wlan0 scan" if your device is named wlan0.

If you can change one of the wifi parameters to get it to work, then go back and change it in your configuration. Then maybe kwifimanager will be able to connect next time.

Until the latest version, kwifimanager didn't support wpa encryption, so I never used it.

I used suse a long time. I miss it, especially yast. but it's not really stable on this new laptop. sabayon is a gentoo-based distro. actually pretty well built and configured.

I'm not exactly sure where the wlan0 configuration is stored. I'll look on the gentoo wiki or something and see if I can adjust any values. That's actually a pretty good idea.