X crashes with SSID Broadcast turned off

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 02/26/2011 08:11 AM, edwardp-jjFNsPSvq+iXDw4h08c5KA at public.gmane.org wrote:
> My laptop has Xubuntu 10.10 installed (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop).  With the SSID Broadcast turned off at the router (the Netgear I recently purchased), once logged into the desktop, it (X?) crashes and returns to the login screen.  Before the actual crash occurred each time, the network-manager icon did not appear on the XFCE taskbar.
> 
> Once SSID is turned back on and logged in, everything is fine.  Why would having this turned off, cause the desktop to crash, unless there is an obvious issue (bug) in network-manager?  On the surface, it would seem that in order to prevent such a crash, Ubuntu and its variants would require SSID be turned on.

An NM bug wouldn't be able to crash the system, it's got to be either a
flakey driver or faulty hardware.  The latter is hard to determine,
although sometimes you can collect evidence via another OS (i.e. if
Windows/BSD/other flavor-of-linux doesn't crash, then it is unlikely the
hardware's fault).

Don't rule out other flavors of linux for your experimentation.  When it
comes to wireless network drivers there are some big differences in
distro-specific kernel patches.  Usually that works out in ubuntu's
favor (they support more cards out of the box), but when you live on the
edge...

HTH,
Matt