How to configure wireless network card

[Timothy Murphy]

On Sunday 03 December 2006 17:30, Matthew Saltzman wrote:

> >>> The card is a Lucent Technologies Gold PCMCIA card (11b),
> >>> with, according to /var/log/dmesg,
> >>> "Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 6.04".
> >>
> >> Mine's Lucent/Agere 8.10.  Other than that, don't know what to say.

I found a card with firmware version 8.10 , so I've been trying that.
Sadly, my experience of NM (NetworkManager)
has if anything been even worse than before.

> NM is more than just a connection profile manager (system-config-network
> can do that part, more or less).  It also wants to support seamless
> roaming and other features to make dynamic connections transparent. Browse
> the NM mailing list to see discussions about complexities of getting
> reliable, dynamic connectivity over wireless.  Timing and signal quality
> issues abound and support for the scanning NM needs to do is highly
> variable across cards and drivers.

Yes, it seems to me it is trying to do far too much,
and not doing anything very well.
If as you say it is difficult to cover all cards and drivers
maybe it is not a good idea to try.

I spent this afternoon trying to use NM with two different 
remote WiFi devices, a PCI Agere/Orinoco device and a Linksys WRT54GL.
I had zero success with both.
According to /var/log/messages the connection failed in both cases
because it ran out of time.

Incidentally one of the devices had WEP encryption
but NM never asked me about this
so I don't see how it could possibly have worked.

There appeared to be no place for any kind of configuration,
and the sole documentation provided with NM
appeared to be a short README.

I googed for an NM tutorial or FAQ but had no joy.

What is really disturbing is that Windows XP has no problem
accessing either of these WiFi devices
(both running on Linux machines!).

WiFi under Fedora really is dreadful.
The only thing I can say for it
is that SuSE was even worse.

Why do none of the WiFi programs
tell you what they have found,
eg "Connected to remote machine but encryption key required",
which it is clear they have learned from /var/log/messages ?

I should add that I have WiFi working perfectly,
by editing /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 .

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland