No WPA option in Network Manager!

First of all thank you for your question.

For your question being answered in detail, it would be very kind, if you'd supply the following information as well.

 * Which wireless card are you using in your laptop?
 * Did this card, however, work with WPA under Linux before? If Yes, which kernel/driver release did you use?
 * Which kernel release are you currently running? Maybe you have you kernel release and version handy as an additional Information.
 * Is your system a freshly installed one?

Already now: thank you for choosing Ubuntu Linux.

Greetings,
                    Joel

- I'm using a Belkin F5D7010 PCMCIA card with ndiswrapper. This has worked great for WEP and unencrypted networks.
- I've never used it with WPA under Linux. I read on the Ubuntu Forums/Wiki that Network Manager was the easiest way to get this working, which is why I'm trying this. Easier methods would be much appreciated, if they exist...
- I'm currently running the stable release version of 6.10 (Edgy). That is to say: the 2.6.17-11-generic kernel image.
- Not sure what you mean by freshly installed. I think I set up this machine when Edgy was first released... but I may have upgraded from Dapper. I forget. One of those two options.

Please let me know if you need any additional information and thanks in advance for the help!!

-Olek

Thank you at this point for the given information :).

For the card... do you know the chipset, it is based on?

First of all, you are lucky... wpa_supplicant supports ndiswrapper in the first place :). IIRC, ndiswrapper supports WPA, if the underlying driver does, so there might be the error. Thats why i need to know the chip type.

I heard before, that NetworkManager has problems using drivers not using the wireless extensions for doing encryption stuff. I can't exactly remember if ndiswrapper used the wireless extensions or its own API for that... That might also be a nice thing to find out. (I had the same problem with a zd1211 chip and NetworkManager in Debian before).

Greetings again, Joel

From lspci:
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

Any other thoughts on why Network Manager is not giving me the WPA option?

earlier, when my zd1211 was not giving me the WPA Otion, i investigated, that this is a communication problem between the driver and the NetworkManager...

NetworkManager - just like my previous zd1211 driver - inthe meantime supports WPA through an API that is called "Wireless Extensions" or short "wext". Both drivers switched there after using their own different API for WPA. I don't know if NetworkManager has to be aware of the drivers type... but the code i reviewed, when i wrote a patch for disabling WPA availability check in NetworkManager (which led to a workling wireless card... until NM was updated some days later ;)) makes me think, that nm is not aware of any hardware related stuff...

Did you try the native driver for the Broadcom wireless cards? THey describe to also support WPA and the driver should already be in the kernel (if you own a box with at least 2.6.17, which is the case).

If it is not and you have major linux experience, install the linux header package for your running kernel and compile it :). I suppose it is mch more stable with your card than the ndiswrapper anyway. ;)

Please give it a try and have a nice day. Sorry for taking so long to help you

The bcm43xx driver is even worse than ndiswrapper. It IS part of my stock kernel but after MANY, MANY frustrating hours I couldn't even get my wireless to connect with no encryption using that driver and I was forced to blacklist it. That's why I've been using ndiswrapper since then. ;)

My Linux experience is respectable, and recompiling the kernel is no big deal, but I'm not sure I see a point to it. Any other ideas?

I'm tempted to think that this is some bug in Network Manager but I fail to see how a bug like this has lasted so long in a stable release...

Ok, if you had no luck with the bcm43xx module, lets just assume that ive never never talked about it. Especially then, recompiling the kernel has no use.

I think its a bug in NetworkManager, too since i've hadthe problem sometimes before. Could you live with using wpa_supplicant like in the good old days[tm] for a while? That would at least a) set you int asituation where you can probably use WPA and b) verify that WPA is working atm with your wpa_supplicant, which would be near a proof of your suspicion that NM is at fault ;). I'd suggest to file it as a bug and wait what happens if that works...

Tips on using wpa_supplucant can be found offline at /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz
i hope that finally gets us out of WEP ;)

i'm really sorry to be unable to help you at this point.

Joel

Hello,
It seems that your problem is already filled as a bug in launchpad, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/network-manager/+bug/101857
You could subscribe to it to see how it evolves.
Cheers,
Huygens