wifi on pavilion dv7

[l0vot]

I installed Debian squeeze AMD64 with Gnome (although the GDM is disabled, so i start the x-server manually upon login) on a HP pavilion dv7, and the WiFi randomly disables itself with no way to turn it back on (the "Enable Wireless" button on the nm-applet is greyed out, and there doesn't seem to be a physical on/off switch for it either). it worked originally, but started randomly shutting off shortly after. Also the network manager applet in debian doesn't appear to manage eth0 or lo, only wlan0 (which is a little annoying if i want to modify the corded connection when i can't use WIFI). I tried restarting the computer and the network manager, which had no effect whatsoever. WIFI works sometimes, and sometimes it just doesn't without giving me a particular reason (same session, same location, nothing different, i checked with other people in the area, and there were multiple networks available while the laptop's WiFi was down). I would like any help i can get.

[mzilikazi]

Also the network manager applet in debian doesn't appear to manage eth0 or lo, only wlan0 (which is a little annoying if i want to modify the corded connection when i can't use WIFI).

http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager#W ... _Unmanaged

Not sure what to tell you about intermittent wifi. Maybe some troubleshooting tips though:

iwconfig <- shows any wireless interfaces on the system
ifconfig -a <- shows interfaces that are available (even if down)
It might be interesting to see what is going on when the wifi goes down.

Also keep in mind that if network-manager isn't doing the trick then perhaps wicd is a better answer.

[ivanovnegro]

Or maybe try the newer Network Manager from backports.

[l0vot]

I tried installing the newest network manager and nm-applet from source, needless to say that didn't end well...

I partially broke the Debian install, and it wont boot properly unless i use recovery mode, I will have to reinstall (again), I broke the previous instillation attempting to fix what appeared to be the same basic problem (good thing i put the users on a different partition then the system, so reinstalling doesn't mean backing up my stuff), but the problem with unmanaged network connections problem has persisted across 4 computers i have installed Debian on, the others are desktops that have no WiFi card, so i don't know if that part of the problem exists on them too.

since 2 of them are AMD Athlon x2 64 bit+Biostar+Nvidia, one is Intel pentium4+dell, an the last is AMDx64+ATI+whatever HP puts in a pavilion dv7, i would say that squeeze has a general network problems.

Also thank you mzilikazi for the link to http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager#W ... _Unmanaged. It worked on the Intel machine, so I will use that on the other installs and see if that fixes their problem.