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

Matthew Saltzman mjs at ces.clemson.edu
Tue Apr 25 12:33:16 UTC 2006


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.

>
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs




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