Gentoo Problem Of The Week (#9)

Sun Feb 16 21:51:23 MSK 2014

This week I’ve faced w/ multiple problems. I’m not rebooting my laptop about a week (installing updates). It started after reboot: DBus 1.8.0 gets crashed w/ malloc check (feature of glibc), so KDM won’t let me to login (due consolekit is not started as well). Compile it w/ full debug and no optimizations can helps, but further investigation still required. While fighting w/ this bug I’ve discovered a note from the NEWS file of consolekit package:

NOTE: ConsoleKit is no longer actively maintained and this will most
likely be the final release. You are advised to switch to logind:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-logind.service.html

At the Getnoo’s wiki page about ConsoleKit:

ConsoleKit’s function is to support in multiuser setups. It also works for a single user, but offers no benefit compared to existing methods.

Then I’ve tried to get rid of console kit (completely), but was failed, cuz polkit depends on it ;-(

**Looks like it is time to think about a migraion to the ~~notorious~~ systemd? **

Now I’m living w/ a debug version of dbus-1.8.0 and further investigation still required… (I’ll update this post later w/ results)

The second trouble happened w/ =wpa_supplicant-2.1 – it just drop connection after regulatory rules gets updated saying smth uncertain about Reason 7. While investigation I’ve met the net-wireless/iw utility, which is intended to supersede the net-wireless/wireless-tools (with iwlist, iwconfig utilities). It provides the iw executable, which is capable to do much more things (see homepage). Particularly, to change current regulatory rules:

root@gentop〉 ~〉 iw reg set RU
root@gentop〉 ~〉 iw reg get
country RU: DFS-UNSET
    (2402 - 2482 @ 40), (N/A, 20)
    (5170 - 5250 @ 80), (N/A, 20)
    (5250 - 5330 @ 80), (N/A, 20), DFS
    (5650 - 5730 @ 80), (N/A, 30), DFS
    (5735 - 5835 @ 80), (N/A, 30)

Unlike the iwconfig, this tool have no a bash-completion file yet ;( and its CLI is quite complicated to use it w/o any help ;-)

Also I’ve found that is possible to hack and recompile regulatory.bin file (one may find a video tutorial about this ;-).

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any reason why my WiFi goes down (loosing AP connection) and only after a manual (re)scan can reconnect, so my solution is to mask the buggy 2.1 version of wpa_supplicant… A bug needs to be reported (sometime).