NetworkManager 0.7.1 About To Arrive

[hdas]

I want knetworkmanager with KDE 3.5 - I don't use KDE 4.

Would you still mind just trying out nm-applet 0.7 in kde 3.5? (I am curious myself to do it, though I might have to compile a ton on packages to get nm 0.7 in my abandoned old gentoo system having kde 3.5 .)

[hdas]

@hdas:
I just found out that I can logon, too, via an unsecured connection

since I'm a little paranoid I'm not feeling good when checking my emails, etc. via that non-encrypted connection

I believe it given the 'fact' that you use hardened gentoo . (Btw, I am hirakendu in gentoo forums .)

[Vadi]

I don't think NM itself does mobile broadband.

At least when I went to file a bug about it, they said "not our problem, this is a Ubuntu-specific feature".

[kernelOfTruth]

@hdas:

I just found out that I can logon, too, via an unsecured connection

since I'm a little paranoid I'm not feeling good when checking my emails, etc. via that non-encrypted connection

I think I'm not the only one having that problem

guest students from abroad probably are facing the same problem: eduroam

google: eduroam networkmanager 0.7

[Kano]

I want knetworkmanager with KDE 3.5 - I don't use KDE 4.

[hdas]

I think even if someone is using kde, especially kde4, one should use nm-applet instead of knetworkmanager. When I was in kde 3.5, I was using knewtorkmanager and it was working fine. But I should say networkmanager and nm-applet 0.7 have improvised a lot and are a completely different story than 0.6*. In my opinion, you can create gazillion profiles with nm-applet and select one which you want at run time.

[Aside, I should make a general note that over the time, gnome and kde are much more harmonic. (Little while back, I was using kde with lots of gnome/gtk apps like eog, evince, firefox, gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer, cheese, empathy..., so I naturally shifted to gnome. But I still use kde apps like kate, kpowersave, kile, k3b, smplayer, vlc and what not.) While they have merged some gap, I hope that sometime in future, it should be completely desktop agnostic and one shouldn't be able to say at first glance that its a gtk/qt app.]

Also, I think multiple network cards are supported parallely. On my laptop, both the wireless and ethernet simultaneously get ip addresses (woneder if both can be used simultaneously, but I am sure ethernet is given preference over wireless).

@ KernelOfTruth : Your univ is very restrictive I must say . We have a unsecure connection and just asked a authentication when using browser for the first time. (May be it stores macaddr or some hardware identification and from then on, its not required to logon from any os.) Meanwhile, I am itching to use the newly installed 80211n routers in our dept building .

[Craig73]

Let's see, there are more than 20000 packages in any decent Linux distribution. Many (most?) of them have bugs in various situations. Should someone be obliged to contribute and submit patches to ALL of those? Get serious! The fact that the software is free doesn't make it somehow "holly" and untouchable, and complaining actually serves a very good purpose -- to make the developers aware of problems and motivate them into fixing those.

I can appreciate your perspective, and not knowing Kano, his statement was quite non-specific in that the tool was degrading in quality and I'm not sure how that helps developers or anyone. Complaints should be specific and actionable, otherwise they are just negativity. [and note I didn't even suggest he fix them... just report the issues he's identified]

[And thank-you Kano for following up and stating what you had issue with, for those of us not intimately familiar with that particular package, it helps us much more in understanding its short comings or issues.]

FWIW - I don't care about static IPs or multiple NICs, and likely most non-technical general end-users don't either, so without clarifying the issues it's hard to know if they apply to a particular use-case... but knowing it trips over minor version upgrades would concern me, especially if I administered a large site.

[kernelOfTruth]

does it work with WPA2 Enterprise now ?

WPA2 Personal works perfectly fine but Enterprise doesn't - so logging in to my university's network is a no-go

[Kano]

The most annoying thing with networkmanger is, that the version in lenny (0.6.6) does not work correctly when updated from 0.6.5. Then I tried the 0.7.0 variant. That does not show the used ip that easy like the older versions and you are required to use NM for static ips. with 0.6.5 it was possible to set one (of two) nic with the /etc/network/interfaces and use only dhcp on the other - ok there was no static ip support at all in there. Of course I need the kde frontend, so maybe the gnome one works better...

[hdas]

First of all, I would say that NetworkManager is a really great tool.

Then comes my rant. Indeed, similar to what Kano said, there is always a bit of a question mark over the quality. Granted that people have so many different network setups, a few bugs should be pardonable. But what sometimes disappoints are simple issues. While it could be said that a simple thing like static ip over ethernet is best done with ifconfig, why would it take networkmanager more than a year to implement it (or release it). True that the focus is wireless and other fancy connections, but please take care of simple things first. Another issue, but I sympathize with nm in this case, is the constantly changing linux kernel api (notably libnl?) and the quality of drivers. I remember having a torrid time with my intel 3945 wireless back in 2007, when I used to frequently try out the iwl3945 drivers and the new 80211 stack and fail miserably and come back again to ipw3945 driver (with a binary daemon). Fortunately, the drivers are no longer an issue (almost, atleast on broadcom and intel wireless).

Regardless, nothing makes me happier than a simple powerful gigabit ethernet connection. (And I always liked Gentoo's networking scripts for this purpose.)

Now back to fancy stuff, how many people (read geeks) are actually using internet using gprs via bluetooth?