I filed the nitty gritty details as this bug against NetworkManager even though I
don't know that it's a Network Manager problem. I don't see any kernel
messages at all that indicate the kernel is mad or confused.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1127022
The gist is that if WiFi comes up at boot time, it works fine for the entirety of that
boot "session". If I reboot, maybe it works again or maybe it doesn't
(non-deterministic); and if it doesn't work, I can't get it to work it's a
total fail. By fail, not only does it not connect to my network, it doesn't see any
networks at all. Turning the WiFi radio off then on doesn't fix it.
b43 wifi has been flakey since maybe kernel 3.11 for me, so it may very well just be time
to give up on that and go with the proprietary driver *sigh* in particular because I only
get 802.11g with b43. No wireless-N. So if there are opinions on being sane and just
giving up, I'd accept that also.
If you've got strong wifi knowledge, probably best to reply in the bug if I can
enhance the quality of the bug reporting. If it's throwing spaghetti at a wall advice,
I'll go for that too, but probably best to keep it on the list until there's
something useful to report in the bug.
Chris Murphy