Comment 0 for bug 210484

Binary package hint: network-manager

Hello!

I've been traveling last week and I stayed at a hotel that had WiFi. I noticed a weird problem. The access points had ESSIDs containing French diacritics—"Hôtel de la Gare 1", etc. (it was a French hotel)—and I couldn't connect to them using nm-applet.

In fact, nm-applet didn't display those ESSIDs at all. The problem might be with wireless-tools or with the driver, though: I've had time to do a bit of looking around. I used "iwlist scan" to check what was going on, and it turns out that it could see the access points, but the 'ô' character in the ESSID was displayed with an "unknown code-point" symbol. However, my terminal is correctly configured to UTF-8 (I can type the character, and 'cat'ing Unicode files with 'ô' works correctly), so I suspected some encoding problems.

I did some logging (I'll attach the files next), which included redirecting the output of the scan to a file. If I open the file with Geany it detects the encoding as ISO-8859-1. I imagine "iwlist" (or maybe the driver or some other component) doesn't do some charset conversion it should do at some point. (Note that Windows laptops in the same room could detect, display and connect to the APs.)

I could connect to the network by using "iwconfig ap [address] && iwconfig essid any", so the APs were probably working correctly.

This should be easy to test by setting the ESSID of your access-point to "Hôtel" (encoded in various charsets, at least ISO-8859-1). Note that the first file I attach was obtained by simply redirecting output of commands while I was typing. So it should contain exactly the bytes outputed by the applications.

(There are two attempts at connection in the log, the first time I mistakenly connected to another AP I didn't have access to. There's some screwing around with dhclient, too.)