network WTF

[David Rosenstrauch <darose@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Got a bit of network weirdness going on here.  2 different Arch laptops, 
an old one and a new one, with completely different hardware (and also 
i686 vs. x86_64), but both are completely up to date with the latest 
repos.  On the old (i686) one, "iwlist scan" works fine from the command 
line, as a non-root user.  On the new one, no dice - I need to be root 
to get back results.

What makes this even more annoying is that apparently some of the 
wireless tools I'm using suffer from this restriction as well.  So on 
the old laptop, kwifimanager and knemo show accurate info about the 
current connection (bit rate, link quality, etc.) while on the new 
laptop these come up empty.

Anyone have any idea what's causing this and/or how to work around it? 
Surely I don't need to run kwifimanager and knemo as root to do it.

I'm guessing there's some obscure setting that's different between the 2 
machines that's controlling this, but I have no clue what it could be.

TIA,

DR