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73416ba
(Get the code!)
I further investigated on this bug and can confirm there is a bug. Connecting to a hidden network with the network manager doesn't work on my feisty installation with kernel 2.6.20-16.
As already stated the wireless extensions of the kernel and Wireless Tools don't match.
aquo@cayley:~$ iwconfig --version
iwconfig Wireless-Tools version 28
Kernel Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v21.
ath0 Recommend Wireless Extension v13 or later,
Currently compiled with Wireless Extension v21.
I tried to resolve the problem by installing unstable wireless tools v29-pre22 on my box. This didn't solve the problem, even if with the upper command wireless extensions of kernel and supported wireless version of wireless tools now match.
This is explainable (same on patched system/unpatched system):
aquo@cayley:~$ ldd /usr/sbin/
...
libiw.so.28 => /lib/libiw.so.28 (0xb7ee9000)
...
The NetworkManager is directly linked against libiw from Wireless Tools (for ubuntu this is an extra package libiw28, the source is distributed with wireless tools) and apparently doesn't use the command line tools like iwconfig, but the library interface. It is possible the that code responsible for translating between different versions of Wireless Extension is part of Wireless tools (like iwlist, iwconfig) and not part of the library and that Network Manager is missing the right translations between the versions.
The unstable wireless tools (not yet released) bring libiw.so.29 with them. I didn't try to replace libiw.so.28 by libiw.so.29.
Conclusion: libiw28 doesn't match the kernel 2.6.20-15/16 on feisty.
Connecting with wpa_supplicant and simple WPA-PSK from commandline works without problem, also connecting with broadcasted ESSID and NetworkManager.
It would be nice if Witold Krakowski could comment on how to recompile the kernel with older wireless extension.