How to configure wireless network card

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
>>> I do not have a ~/.gconf/system directory at all....
>>
>> Then you aren't using NetworkManager.
>
> In my experience, NM just adds another layer of obfuscation
> to an already confusing (and confused) setup.
> I found after a lot of experiment (and requests on the NM mailing list)
> that NM just did not work with my WiFi card,
> a standard (if old) Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card.
> Basically, it tried to turn the card to a mode it did not support.

I sort-of recall that thread.  I have a relatively old Orinoco card in one 
machine that works just fine with NM, except that there's no WPA support. 
I did nothing special to configure it, just used the standard tools 
(system-config-network and NM).

>
> The support for WiFi under Fedora is unbelievably bad.
> There are files all over the place that might or might not
> have some relevance.

The support for WiFi in Linux in general is a mess.  There's some pressure 
(much of it due to the NM developers) to standardize what can be 
standardized.  Fedora's attempts to hide the ugliness from the user have 
been only partially successful, and when they don't work, the view under 
the hood is downright scary.

>
>> Most of the settings you care about can be manipulated in
>> system-config-network.  Most of those are in
>> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*.
>
> In my experience - admittedly not for some time -
> system-config-network is liable to make a bad situation even worse.

For quite some time now, I've used s-c-n to configure networking almost 
exclusively and it's almost always done the job.  The profile stuff always 
seemed a bit flakey, but I gave it up for NM in FC5 and never looked back.

If you can live with the standard tools to admin your box, it's a lot 
easier to do so than to try to remember how to make everything 
interoperate smoothly by hand.

>
>> If you use NetworkManager, profiles of wireless networks you have visited
>> are kept in the .gconf subdir and keys are kept in your GNOME keyring.
>
> Are you saying that you have to use GNOME in order to use NM?
> Wouldn't surprise me.

Not at all (though I am in fact using GNOME).  But you do have to have the 
keyring, and if you want to do something by hand to the keys that 
NetworkManager manages (e.g., delete them), you need to run 
gnome-keyring-manager.  I don't know if there is a KDE interface to the 
keyring.

There's a KDE applet for NM now, and AIUI, the GNOME applet will run OK in 
the KDE panel.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

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