NM: the usual rant

Timothy Murphy gayleard at eircom.net
Sun Mar 1 19:51:37 UTC 2009


Kevin Kofler wrote:

>> I'm having problems with NM again.
>> I often have to re-boot once or twice before it connects.
> 
> It's probably a bug in your network (wireless?) driver rather than NM.
> What driver are you using?

orinoco_cs .
My impression is that NM does not wait long enough at some point,
which if true could be reported in normal English.

... 
>> Surely Linux error messages should be intelligible
>> by the common user?
>> Or are they intended solely for gurus?

> They're intended solely for driver developers, there's nothing you can do
> about these errors anyway if you're not a kernel driver developer. Just
> file a bug against the network driver you're using.

In the good old days one could understand why They said "error 478",
because space was so short.
Nowadays everyone has acres of space.
Even if the kernel error messages are kept secret,
I think the NM messages, "stage 6 -> stage 7", etc,
could be made intelligible with very few extra bytes.
Eg "Contacted dhcp server. Response: unknown device."
This would at least suggest where to look.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland





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