Matthew Saltzman wrote:
On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Michael A. Peters wrote:
On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 23:20 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
I'm an "old hand" at Linux, and am able to make my wired & wireless
connections work, but only with some difficulty. Yesterday I helped a
young lady install linux on a laptop and found it darned-near
impossible to explain to her how she is supposed to handle the problem
of going for place-to-place, using different wired and wireless
networks. So I wondered if the Gnome or KDE folks had worked this
out.
The path they are taking is network-manager.
That's spelled NetworkManager, as in
# chkconfig netowrk off
# chkconfig NetworkManager on
# service NetworkManager start
In GNOME, that should be all that's needed, but if nothing happens,
you may also need to run nm-applet as the user.
I haven't tried it in FC5 - but in FC4 it worked for me to a point, but
kept dropping my connection (I use madwifi). So I do it manually now.
Hopefully as network-manager improves, that won't be necessary.
I should try it in fc5 to see how well it works - maybe they have made
it better.
It's lots better now than in FC4, but there's still some room for
improvement.
To some extent, how well it works depends on your wireless hardware.
Paul Johnson didn't specify in his post, but if he has trouble with
NM, he can report back for some help.
I like how moms Dell does it under Windows XP - first time she came to
visit, I had to give her my info. Now - whenever she is here, it just
figures out to use my network. She doesn't have to do anything. Just
works.
That's NetworkManager's objective. It comes pretty close for many
users now.
I use NetworkManager and NetworkManager-vpnc to connect to my wired and
wireless VPN (Cisco) networks. Works near flawlessly for me. Seems to
have a problem with some atheros chipsets in FC5 though. Also, I
couldn't get WPA working (WEP works fine, though I just plug in to my
router usually), but I think there were some changes in how WPA is
handled for the ipw2200 chipset, and I will be trying again shortly.
Turn on NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services for startup
in system-config-services, and turn off network, all just in runlevel 5
(they try to do the same thing so might end up connecting you twice).
This is the same thing that the chkconfig command does.
-Dan
