Re: How does Fedora want "ordinary people" to manage mobile network computing?

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.

-Dan