I know this isn't of great help, but in the forum there are lots of people complaining that iwlist isn't working as non-root user with the new kernel (2.6.29) On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Jaime Oyarzun Knittel <joyarzun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > David Rosenstrauch wrote: >> 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. > > Normally 'iwlist wlanX scan' as user just reads a previous scan, and > with root privileges it does actually scan for networks. > >> >> 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. > > Maybe it's a group issue? Are the users in the 'network' group? Can you > associate manually to an access point? > >> >> 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. >> > > If it's not a permission issue, my guess is that the wireless cards send > different results (assuming they're different cards). > > Maybe you should start the 'broken' machine with a LiveCD from another > distro or ArchLinux i686 LiveCD to see if it's Arch failing or your > hardware. > > I hope it helps. > > -- > mitoyarzun > http://www.archlinux.cl/ >
