Cinnamon: Refresh wireless list

[jackalsh]

I really lack the feature of refreshing wireless network list within the panel widget. Please add this to cinnamon. Thanks.

[bimsebasse]

mine refreshes automatically?

[jackalsh]

I turn on wifi router and must wait till new network will appear on it. Wasted time. It would be nice to have little button on it for manual refreshing the list. Not a critical, but a little bit missing.

[AlbertJP]

It should refresh automatically. Or do you have to wait much longer than in other desktops? That you have to wait a moment when the router is only just turned on, is quite normal. Routers can take up to a minute after turning on before everything is ready.

[mtwebster]

Networkmanager currently provides no way to force a refresh of access points - I think I read somewhere they scan once every 20 or 30 seconds, then once every 2 minutes after so long. Then once connected, it refreshes once every 2 minutes.

Even calling a command line: iwlist wlan0 scan didn't properly update the list.

I haven't given up yet on this, but not looking promising.

[AlbertJP]

I can confirm this. If I resume from suspend, then it takes ages before it detects my network (another network nearby often appears immediately). But if I run sudo iwlist scan, it suddenly does detect the network.

[mtwebster]

@AlbertJP I didn't think it was reliable, because it wouldn't remove networks that I knew were gone, even after iwlist scan.

[mtwebster]

@AlbertJP I had started messing with the applet, if you find anything useful out of this

Still needs lots of work but there it is.

[AlbertJP]

@mtwebster When I booted my computer this time, it only listed another network in the applet, though, in sudo iwlist scan, it only listed my own network. The refresh button did not help. I needed to run sudo iwlist scan again to make it detect my own network.
It also frequently occurs that the applet displays the wireless as unavailable, not allowing any wifi connections, because the wifi card was not ready yet by the time Cinnamon started. This seems to be some kind of race condition that only occurs sometimes.

[DiegoQueiroz]

I also lack this feature. Sometimes I am connected to my company's wireless network and want to change to my mobile's network (tethering 3g). It is a pain to wait for to network to "appear" only because I'm already connected to other network.

In comparison to Windows (as an end-user), my cell phone's network appear immediately when I click on the refresh button.

[AlbertJP]

@mtwebster I'm wondering why it suddenly does refresh if I run "sudo iwlist scan", so it might be an issue with the underlying NetworkManager on 13. I haven't experienced this on Mint 12.

[anandrkris]

Linking to N/W meta bug report.
https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/2746

[AlbertJP]

@jackalsh Is this still a problem? Else I'll close the issue.

[spdionis]

@AlbertJP this is still a problem. It still takes a lot of time for new networks to appear. I use my tablet as a wireless hotspot and, especially if the pc had already connected to another wifi, it takes 1-2 minutes of (painful) waiting before the new network appears. Compare this to windows (7) where this takes 5-10 seconds at most.

The solution I use for now is turning off and on wireless. This is mildly annoying.

[rellieberman]

Still a problem on 18.1. I usually run service network-manager restart too speed up the process and immediately see the new available networks. sudo iwlist scan works as well, but a button that would do it would be great.

[harryio]

The wifi does not automatically connect to the previously connected network after i resume from suspend. When I check available network list it shows 1 or 2 nearby networks and in some cases shows no networks at all. Have to use sudo iwlist scan to get around this problem.

[glitchsys]

Can't believe this is 2017 and this is still an issue. I needed to disconnect from my wireless and reconnect to get a new DHCP IP and as soon as I turned off Wireless and turned it back on, some random weak signaled SSID showed up but none of the 8 or 9 other SSID's in my area showed up. I sat there for a good minute waiting for the list to populate but nothing, just that one SSID I have nothing to do with. I eventually had to run "sudo service network-manager restart" to get the list to update. I love Linux Mint, don't get me wrong, but scanning for wireless networks shouldn't be so difficult.

[matas-zanevicius]

When I'm on the road I usually turn my phone into a hotspot and access 4G+ network through it. Since SSID and password are always the same, my laptop connects automatically. But if I turn on the computer first, I either have to wait few minutes, after enabling AP, before before I'm connected, or turn wifi off and then back on again. If refreshing the list is really that difficult to do, perhaps adding a button that kind of refreshes by doing off/on is not such a bad idea?

[mscheper]

I'm just adding another use case here, to explain the relative urgency of this problem. (Call it a rant if you like, but if it expresses the frustration that we travelling Cinnamon lovers experience, it serves its purpose.)

My home broadband connection has been acting up a lot lately (Comcast is a rant in itself), so I often want to switch to my phone's wifi hotspot. Pursuant to Murphy's Law, this typically happens when I'm in a net meeting or some other time-critical client-facing situation, so it's important for me to be able to switch networks quickly. But since my actual wifi connection is fine (the uplink is the problem), the network manager doesn't rescan very often, so it can take the full two minutes or whatever for my phone's access point to appear and be selectable. (I'm also usually in a densely populated area, with scores of wifi networks, so it's not always clear when the rescanning has happened.)

I deal with this particularly often while I'm travelling. Public wifi on trains and in cafés and airports is often really bad, so I want to be able to switch to my phone's wifi access point. But it always takes painfully long for it to appear.

It might be hard for developers with solid network connections to imagine why this is a big deal, but in all seriousness, the time I've spent waiting for wifi networks to appear has probably added up to an hour in the past year... a minute or two, once or twice each week, sounds about right. And clients are more forgiving about one- or two-minute connection drop-outs than three- or four-minute drop-outs, and this issue makes that difference.

[mtwebster]

No one doubts the usefulness of this, but often times, we are at the mercy of the libraries we use or inherit using. If you read above, there was no reliable way of doing this in the past. It was added later but clearly no one raised enough noise to make me go and check again - until now ;)

I've added a pull request for a very simple implementation of it - https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/pull/6614 - if we weren't currently in a feature freeze for an imminent release, I'd simply commit it, but it may have to wait. It appears to function as it should, though due to how the applet is constructed, it's not simple to do what I had wanted, that is having a small refresh icon at the heading of the access point list, and that can be something for a later date.

If you're on the latest Cinnamon (probably at least 3.2 would be ok,) you could simply edit your existing applet, at least until this gets merged - it's just a text file if you'd like to test (/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/[email protected]/applet.js)

[joaoherberto]

I am all for this fix/upgrade. But if I may ask a silly question, why not refresh the list every time the wireless network list is accessed, why else would you be there? Seems to me that it should just refresh every time you access wi-fi list. Adding a refresh button will be more overhead that is just not needed.

[DiegoQueiroz]

I think both are desirable.

There are several situation where a refresh button is useful:

• when you start to tether the internet from phone;
• when you just turn on a wireless router
• when you are walking randomly searching for an network in range

It would be a pain to request the user to close/open the list several times to see if the network he wants is reachable.

[joaoherberto]

"It would be a pain to request the user to close/open the list several times to see if the network he wants is reachable."

Good point, then you are correct, both are needed.

[leigh123linux]

cinnamon-3.6 has wifi rescan

[digitig]

Nope. I managed to connect to WiFi once, never managed even to see the network since. Abandoning Mint, trying a different distro.