What I do for wireless networking is a kludge of the first water. I use "service network restart" for my home network. It is set up with WEP using 64 bit (10 hex digit) keys and does not broadcast its SSID. I cannot access my home network with NetworkManager (hereafter NM). However, I can use NM to get on a local open network. So I find myself toggling between those two tools. NM's documentation is pathetic. Such documentation as exists is on the NM web site, making it rather useless if you're trying to access the net somewhere. (When else would the ordinary user care to see NM documentation?) The prompts are useless to those who are not wireless network gurus. To give a trivial example, when entering a WEP key as a hex value, do I enter a leading 0x or not? Kwifimanager, by the way, qualifies WEP keys as you enter them, one keystroke at a time, so that it is obvious when you have entered a valid key and when you have not. If the target user for NM is the wireless illiterate, the implementers should design the prompts for the wireless illiterate, not for themselves. The way to do this is get several wireless illiterates to attempt to make multiple connections. Encourage the testers to ask questions. The answer to each and every question the testers asks should be put -- in simple language -- into the GUI where the user can find it. NM makes no effort to preserve attempted logon data across tries. If your attempt fails, and you want to try different things, you have to stop the daemon, restart it, then retype everything, not just the changes. This is the sort of inane user-hostile stupidity one expects of a Vogon. Because of these idiocies, I've given up trying to use NM on my home network. NM is very nice when it works. You fire it up (you shouldn't even have to do that; you should be able to leave it running), and it connects, even to a network it's never seen before. But when human intervention is required (such as entering a WEP key), it is user hostile to the point of uselessness. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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