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@alumnos.inf.utfsm.cl> 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/