SOLVED: Debian 5.0.2 network manager not working?

[Mark Marcacci <mamarcac@gmail.com>]

In what will remain one of the great mysteries of my life...somehow during installing Lenny 5.0.2 my BIOS setting was changed to "Wireless Off" instead of "Wireless On".  I am not joking - haven't touched the BIOS in months but as soon I changed it to "Wireless On", I connected to my home network with zero problems.

Wow.  I wonder if this is some freak case or others are going to have the same issue with fresh 5.0.2 installations.  The BIOS was the last place I thought about checking and it was just a "on the off chance the BIOS got changed..." type thought that turned out to be true.

I saw another thread about someone unable to connect to wireless and had the same symptoms as me - hopefully they read this and it works for them too.

Thanks for all who offered ideas and advice!
Mark

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Marcacci <mamarcac@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 6:03 PM
Subject: Re: Debian 5.0.2 network manager not working?
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org


Well, apparently Network Manager isn't the problem since I installed wicd and it says "No wireless networks found" (even after removing LAN line, rebooting, etc).  Have done a ton of researching, editing different files such as /etc/network/interfaces, but nothing seems to get my wireless card to sniff out signals no matter what I do.

I'm at a loss, can anyone help?  Again my system info is a Broadcom BCM4306 wifi card on a Dell Inspiron 8600 with a fresh install of Lenny.  I had the wifi working without hardly any effort with 5.0.1 but now with 5.0.2 it won't "wake up" so to speak and sniff out wireless networks.  iwconfig shows this:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"" 
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated  
          Tx-Power=20 dBm  
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B  
          Encryption key:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Thanks,
Mark

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Andrei Popescu <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon,29.Jun.09, 14:02:38, Mark Marcacci wrote:

> Is wicd more widely used?

I don't know, but for me it Just Works. I also installed it on my
mothers laptop (lenny) from backports and had no issues with it.

Regards,
Andrei
--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)

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