I've been using Kali Linux casually for about a year now and have been pleased enough to install it as a dual-boot OS and as an Encrypted Persistence USB. I upgraded (via clean install) to Kali 2.0 over the summer on both installs and had no issues, WiFi worked out of the box. I recently bought a new USB Disk and wished to run Kali on it instead of on the orignal smaller USB. Instead of copying the USB, I performed a clean image, using Win32 to copy the Kali2.0-i386 iso onto the new 64GB USB, before setting up encrypted persistence using the guide (http://docs.kali.org/downloading/kal...sb-persistence). I am using i386 for compatibility with older machines, but my laptop (current machine) is amd64.
This worked fine and I booted the encrypted persistence as normal with no issues, until when the GUI (Gnome 3) opened I noticed that Network-Manager showed no networks, therefore I couldn't get on the WiFi even with a lot of refreshing and restarting. Ethernet works as usual, and I installed linux-headers-kali-4.0.0-i386 to see if that would resolve the problem (build-essential is installed by default). It didn't. ifconfig detects eth0, lo and wlan0 and lspci picks up the adapter. modprobe ath9k (my wireless driver) returns no errors. rfkill shows no blocking.
What makes this issue stranger is rebooting into live 686-pae from the same USB disk boots as normal with no errors but WiFi works as normal, picking up my network and all my neighbours' also, so I can connect to it and and post this through it. Also, Kali 2.0 on the old USB (with encrypted persistence) worked fine with WiFi out of the box as far as I remember, as did Kali 1.1.0
Is this a bug or something on my end? I would like to know that my USB persistence will work with most computers (hence i386) and WiFi adapters without the need for downloading drivers via ethernet on each PC. Wireless is a very important part of Kali and I would like to ensure this functionality will be portable.