Comment 8 for bug 128360

I tested again tonight with the Gutsy Tribe-4 i386 live cd and the results appeared to be the following:

ifup with wpasupplicant works most of the time, I managed to get it to fail sometimes but not very often. Its usable but can be irritating, when it decides to fail it usually does it repeatedly.

Network Manager most of the time only sees the open AP and can not connect to it. For some reason it could not see the WPA AP most of the time. I also noticed that several times (at least) when the system first booted it actually would already be connected to the open AP by the time it finished booting and I ran ifconfig. However NM did not show the network as connected. I don't know if that was related to why I was not seeing the WPA AP, perhaps it didn't see it since it was already connected to the open AP when it did the scan? Also if I tried to connect to the open AP after it had already connected on boot via NM it would not connect to the network. Somehow at one point (I don't remember the details) I was able to get NM to connect (associate) to the open AP but it did not run dhclient to get an ip address. I was able at that point to run ifup and it obtained the ip address, I did not have to change anything in /etc/network/interfaces for that to work apparently because it was already associated at that point and it seemed to just run dhclient.

It is possible some of these issues are related to ipw3945 in particular but the fact that ifup/wpasupplicant works the majority of the time makes me think it is just NM being extremely buggy.