Okay, so this happens to me kind of a lot, first on my desktop, now on this laptop to which I am transferring my system.
On my desktop, I get round some of these problems with an external wifi adapter (an old C.Crane WiFire antenna). Whenever I pack up my desktop, then I will be able to try it out on the laptop, too, but for now that is a big hassle.
Problem is, I actually have wireless with the laptop, and the signal is stronger than with my wifi antenna on my desktop. But after installing TDE and getting out of the xfce desktop, the wifi works through two or three reboots, then suddenly it says I have problems with dbus, or that I am not authorized to manage networking, etc.
I enabled the non-free and contrib packages in the repositories, and I already got all the packages that I am supposed to need for wireless networking, and this helps ... for a while. But like I said, after a couple of reboots, the wireless disappears. I believe that it still works if I go into the xfce desktop, so why doesn't my tdenetworkmanager or wicd or anything seem to work?
I've already gone through the usual troubleshooting tricks, iwconfig, ifconfig, etc. When I try to enable wireless, why do I get an error message that txpower is "wrong syntax"? Also, I expected that the name of the wireless connection would follow Beowulf/Buster with wlx-something. I hear that Chimaera/Bullseye is supposed to wlps20, but after installing TDE, I find that it has somehow reverted to Jessie-style names, wlan0 ... which doesn't seem right. I don't have anything but Devuan Chimaera installed.
My laptop is a Lenovo Ideapad 3 15.6", 8 gb DDR. Everything is factory, except that I upgraded the internal hard drive from a 128 gb to a 2 tb. It's one of those newer SSDs.
Please feel free to trim. I just tried to include everything that seemed like it could be signficant. Thanks for any help or suggestions.
Bill
On Sat, 25 Dec 2021 11:40:26 -0800 William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
I've already gone through the usual troubleshooting tricks, iwconfig, ifconfig, etc. When I try to enable wireless, why do I get an error message that txpower is "wrong syntax"? Also, I expected that the name of the wireless connection would follow Beowulf/Buster with wlx-something. I hear that Chimaera/Bullseye is supposed to wlps20, but after installing TDE, I find that it has somehow reverted to Jessie-style names, wlan0 ... which doesn't seem right. I don't have anything but Devuan Chimaera installed.
wlan0 (and eth0) are the default names branded into the kernel. Unless a specific kernel command-line option is passed, udev or equivalent overules the default during the boot process. So there's nothing intrinsically wrong with those names— Devuan probably just sets "net.ifnames=0".
Now, what do you know about the wireless hardware itself? Do you know what driver it uses? The chipset (I think you may have said previously, but I don't remember)? Is it one of the rfkill-encumbered chipsets? Is wpa_supplicant installed, or are you genuinely trying to configure everything via wireless_tools (iw*)?
E. Liddell
On Saturday 25 December 2021 14:26:22 E. Liddell wrote:
On Sat, 25 Dec 2021 11:40:26 -0800
Now, what do you know about the wireless hardware itself? Do you know what driver it uses? The chipset (I think you may have said previously, but I don't remember)? Is it one of the rfkill-encumbered chipsets?
Qualcomm Atheros Wireless Network Adapter 64 bits
I already installed the firmware, and it worked, both in xfce and in the TDE desktops. Then after a few reboots (during which I neither installed nor removed anything), it suddenly stops, and all the network icons say network is disabled.
sudo lshw -C network yields this:
*-network DISABLED
sudo rfkill unblock wlan (in any combination) seems to do nothing. I made little changes to the file: /etc/network/interfaces which accomplished nothing, so I restored the original configuration, and still nothing.
Is wpa_supplicant installed, or are you genuinely trying to configure everything via wireless_tools (iw*)?
E. Liddell
I never did manage to get wpa_supplicant to work right. Usually I can depend on wicd-gtk, if nothing else, but it seems that it won't work any more in chimaera/bullseye (although I found it in the sid repositories). So I purged wicd, and still nothing. I tried restarting networking, network-manager, etc.
On Beowulf/Buster, I had problems with the tdenetworkmanager. I would actually prefer to stick with TDE, but it seems to prefer systemd. I believe it was yourself who suggested that I could use elogd (is that the name?) and do without systemd. I thought that I would give Debian and systemd a try, since I have a much more up-to-date machine to work with, but it was a still a pain in the seat of my behind to get Debian to work (as I forget about those non-free packages).
The thing is, I have a fairly limited period of time to get this working right, so that I can make a few trips. If I can at least get Devuan working, then later I can try out Debian and systemd on top of that working configuration.
Bill
On Saturday 25 December 2021 14:26:22 E. Liddell wrote:
On Sat, 25 Dec 2021 11:40:26 -0800
Is wpa_supplicant installed, or are you genuinely trying to configure everything via wireless_tools (iw*)?
E. Liddell
I didn't want anybody to think ill of me, that I was averse to new experiences, so I poked around and found that wpa_supplicant has a wpa_gui. So I fired it up, entered all the necessary information, shared key, etc., and I get a message "Could not get status from wpa_supplicant".
On one of my reboots I went into the bios settings, just to be sure, and I do have wifi enabled, so it's not a problem at that level.
The puzzle for me is why it will work just fine for a few reboots. Once I get it working, I avoid messing with it until I know my system better, but this doesn't make any sense. It works, then it doesn't.
Bill
On Sat December 25 2021 15:52:19 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
The puzzle for me is why it will work just fine for a few reboots. Once I get it working, I avoid messing with it until I know my system better, but this doesn't make any sense. It works, then it doesn't.
FWIW I've used TDE and wifi with many Debian versions and one or two Debuan versions and am currently using Debian Bullseye.
I do not use systemd or network-manager or network-manager-tde or wicd or any other wifi automation other than wpa_supplicant.
I simply edit /etc/network/interfaces to include:
auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet manual wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf iface default inet dhcp
And then /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf as appropriate, e.g.:
network={ ssid="Some SSID" psk="trinityrulez" }
network={ ssid="Another SSID" key_mgmt=NONE }
You might want to see if you can get the basics working reliabily before worrying about automation or GUI.
--Mike
On Saturday 25 December 2021 16:18:20 Mike Bird wrote:
On Sat December 25 2021 15:52:19 William Morder via tde-users wrote:
The puzzle for me is why it will work just fine for a few reboots. Once I get it working, I avoid messing with it until I know my system better, but this doesn't make any sense. It works, then it doesn't.
FWIW I've used TDE and wifi with many Debian versions and one or two Debuan versions and am currently using Debian Bullseye.
I do not use systemd or network-manager or network-manager-tde or wicd or any other wifi automation other than wpa_supplicant.
I simply edit /etc/network/interfaces to include:
auto wlan0 iface wlan0 inet manual wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf iface default inet dhcp
And then /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf as appropriate, e.g.:
network={ ssid="Some SSID" psk="trinityrulez" }
network={ ssid="Another SSID" key_mgmt=NONE }
You might want to see if you can get the basics working reliabily before worrying about automation or GUI.
--Mike
I will give this a try. FWIW, I am trying to avoid using a lot of GUI stuff. But, as I said, I don't have for ever to get this working right.
It has been more than a few years since I have had a new machine to work on; I copied over everything from my desktop, but since it's different hardware (and so many other things), I don't overwrite anything, but just use them for reference.
Bill
On Sat, 25 Dec 2021 15:52:19 -0800 William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote:
On Saturday 25 December 2021 14:26:22 E. Liddell wrote:
On Sat, 25 Dec 2021 11:40:26 -0800
Is wpa_supplicant installed, or are you genuinely trying to configure everything via wireless_tools (iw*)?
E. Liddell
I didn't want anybody to think ill of me, that I was averse to new experiences, so I poked around and found that wpa_supplicant has a wpa_gui. So I fired it up, entered all the necessary information, shared key, etc., and I get a message "Could not get status from wpa_supplicant".
Did you have the daemon running in the background? The various configurators for wpa_supplicant act as clients with the daemon as a server.
Back to basics. Your /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file should contain a line that sets ctrl_interface to something (no idea what the recommendations for your distro are), and one that says "update_config=1".
Open two konsole (or whatever) windows. In one, issue (tack on sudo if required):
# killall wpa_supplicant
# wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd
That should restart the daemon in the foreground in debug mode. In the other konsole:
# wpa_cli
Unless some error message pops up in the boilerplate, at the new prompt say "scan" and then "scan_results". If at that point, it gives you an ugly table of SSIDs, everything is working as it should, and you can tell it "quit" and try wpa_gui again.
E. Liddell
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E. Liddell -
Mike Bird -
William Morder