Wireless newbies -- just try NetworkManager!

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 9:54 AM, John W. Linville <linville at redhat.com> wrote:
> I'm posting this message to no one in particular, in hopes that it
>  becomes part of the common lore...
>
 I'm a little hurt.  I read it as being specifically intended for me. :)

And it does help.   I'm going to conduct more tests, but it is
starting to appear that one culprit was the wpa_supplicant process
that was started at boot time. I don't know why, but there was always
a wpa_supplicant process running, even though I have no wpa networks.
I believe this was set that way by Fedora 6 or Fedora 7, and F8
inherited it. I knew to turn off "network" but not wpa_supplicant.

After turning off the wpa_supplicant service, (making sure network is
off too), and turning on NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher,
and restarting, I found that after I ran the user program "nm-applet"
, I could join some wireless networks today.

I'm driving around to some other places to try to find some other
kinds of wireless routers.  In my town, businesses are very friendly
in offering free wireless access in their stores.  Very pleasant
compared to some European countries I've visited.


>  Please, as the first step in trying to get wireless working on Fedora,
>  before you do anything else, please just try:
>
>         service NetworkManager start
>
>  Please note that I said to try that _first_.  Specifically, "first"
>  does not mean "after I ran system-config-network" or "after I started
>  wpa_supplicant" or even "after I tried to configure things manually".
>  "First" means _first_.
>
>  Please?
>
>  John
>  --
>  John W. Linville
>  linville at redhat.com
>


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas