Karmic BETA: Intel PRO/Wireless 5300 always disabled in nm-applet

This appears to describe the problem that i am experiencing.

Equipment : Toshiba Satellite L300-20D

Please note that I am not technical.

( p.s. Karmic presents as most polished yet! )

I'm glad because I really felt alone for a while there. No searching I could do was showing up anything to do with Karmic and 5300 problems with disabled wireless.

Dell mini 10v same problem occurs.

Does your mini 10v use an Intel 5300 AGN? If not this might be wider than just my card.

I'm also having a problem with the wifi connection. This is on a Dell 1530 and 1330 with Intel 3945 internal cards.
What's interesting is that the live beta from 10/3 that I put on a usb stick works fine and connects to my wifi network just fine but doing an install from bootup (NOT from the desktop) wifi doesn't work. Then I did a apt-get update / dist-upgrade. During that upgrade I saw a notice that network-manager couldn't find some resources it needed. When the upgrade was done wifi would connect for maybe 3 seconds and then disconnect. It would then try to reconnect again but wouldn't. So this is where I am now.

please test whether the latest NM pieces I just uploaded to karmic help (wait ~5h or so before upgrading/testing). Thanks!

maybe upgrading everything to latest helps here? otherwise this is a driver issue imo.

I have updated and no luck. Is it a drivers issue bearing in mind "wicd" works perfectly?

Here's a series of things that lets me scan for networks.

When I do a "sudo iwlist scan" - I get the message "Network is down".

I then perform "sudo ifconfig wlan0 up" - it completes successfully.

Doing a "sudo iwlist scan" now returns networks.

Although network manager still reports "Wireless is disabled", I have done "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" in the past and no change.

Running "nm-tool" is fruitless too.

subscribed tony who might know a bit more.

In syslog attached there is clearly the killswitch turned on, but he says that wicd works at same time, so its probably a bug related to rfkill.

(he == John Ward)

Cheer Alexander. I'll try some messing with rfkill. I noticed somebody else solved there similar problem that way, there setup was slightly different and when I used rfkill to bring down certain ifaces it didn't do anything although I didn't try all.

what do you get when running "rkill list" ... maybe you have a dell?

I do indeed have a Dell, was actually going to post rfkill output but realised that it got automatically submitted above. Heres another:
john@vostro:~$ rfkill list
0: dell-wifi: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: yes
 Hard blocked: yes
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: no

Yes I have a Dell, a Vostro 1520.

OK, I'm booted into Live Karmic 64-bit and network-manager works!

I'll try 32-bit again, I'm downloading fresh ISO's of everything (I'm paranoid) and first trying live and then fresh install and I'll see whether this is an architecture based issue.

Here's the lie of the land now. So far I have tried 32-bit live and installed and 64-bit live and installed:

32-bit Live: no wireless
32-bit installed + updated: no wireless
(NOTE: I have done this completely fresh again with new ISO's to eliminate the possiblity of a former bad ISO)

64-bit Live: No problems
64-bit installed + updated: No problems

This IS a cross architecture problem.

Also my rfkill is different under 64-bit:

john@VOSTRO:~$ rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
 Soft blocked: no
 Hard blocked: no

My 32-bit can be seen in the above posts and the rfkill.txt attachment.

Hope this is helpful.

Just an added note. On my Dell XPS1530 with a intel 3945 wifi card, Karmic 32 bit with latest upgrades I was finally able to get stable wifi. I went into network-manager (Right click - Edit connections) and deleted my hidden wifi connection. Then I clicked on the antenna icon and my hidden ssid was still there so I clicked on it and a box came up asking for my WPA password which I entered then clicked connect and it worked. A stable connection that also works on reboot. The only other time I used (Edit connectiions) was when I first installed Karmic beta.

I think this might be a dell-laptop regression, well, where it relates to rfkill not registering properly. I'm wondering if a bios update will fix it. (i think there was a ubuntu specific patch for the dell laptops - not sure?)

in any case, i think it's tied into the rfkill detecting the wireless as disabled even though it's not (at least, that looks like it's the problem i'm having here).

wand detects and operates fine, so i doubt it's a "wireless" driver issue, more likely it's a kernel/rkill regression of some sort.

To rlh:
This I've seen before as a fix, and in relation to an Intel 5300 as well but in this case it's unrelated as I don't even have pre-configured connection under "Wireless", thanks for the reply anyway.

To icesmurf:
The good news is there's a BIOS update available to version A03. I had trouble applying it under Vista a few weeks ago and didn't care too much for it after that but I'll try again. Cheer's.

easy work around for this bug, is just to "rmmod dell-laptop" and add it to /etc/modprobe.d/dell-laptop.conf

blacklist dell-laptop

-

then everything works like a charm, once the dell firmware updates are available for karmic, this shouldnt be a big drama.

Good news ensues. Sorry for the delay in returning to this, got very busy over the weekend.

I applied the A03 BIOS update and SUCCESS, 32-bit live enabled the wireless and I made successful connections.

I had trouble upgrading the BIOS on this model, here's what I didn't do:

This applies to .exe in Vista.

- You need external power plugged in.
- If the executable doesn't work first time try running as administrator

Out of interest is a fix going to be applied for non-updated BIOS models, or possibly a recommendation added to the release notes to upgrade to BIOS A03 (technically the best outcome - updated BIOS's are better than non-updated ones).

Undoubtedly other Vostro 1520's are going to suffer this problem.

What should the status of this bug be set to now?

most dell-laptop rfkill bugs should be fixed in latest kernels. do you still see this with everything updated to latest and rebooting?

I have only tested this with Live 32-bit after the BIOS update - there was success, but not yet with an installed and fully updated 32-bit system. I am currently using 64-bit Karmic without any problems at any stage. I will get a chance sometime this coming week to install 32-bit and report back.

I have re-installed 32-bit and fully updated it. No longer problems with wireless due to BIOS update.