How does Fedora want "ordinary people" to manage mobile network computing?

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 25 April 2006 08:33, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Michael A. Peters wrote:
>> On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 23:20 -0500, Paul Johnson wrote:
>>> I'm an "old hand" at Linux, and am able to make my wired & wireless
>>> connections work, but only with some difficulty.  Yesterday I
>>> helped a young lady install linux on a laptop and found it
>>> darned-near impossible to explain to her how she is supposed to
>>> handle the problem of going for place-to-place, using different
>>> wired and wireless networks.  So I wondered if the Gnome or KDE
>>> folks had worked this out.
>>
>> The path they are taking is network-manager.
>
>That's spelled NetworkManager, as in
>
>  # chkconfig netowrk off
>  # chkconfig NetworkManager on
>  # service NetworkManager start
>
Which might be 100% fine, but you need to throw in that it might be fine 
IF you're NOT using ndiswrapper for a broadcom chipset.  I tried that 
once and it destroyed wlan0. I was smart enough to have kept a backup 
copy though.  As to the DriverLoader thingy, I'd expect similar 
results.

Which leads me to ask, since there is a bcmwl5.ko module present in the 
2096 modules tree, how far away is it from actually being useable?

>In GNOME, that should be all that's needed, but if nothing happens,
> you may also need to run nm-applet as the user.
>
>> I haven't tried it in FC5 - but in FC4 it worked for me to a point,
>> but kept dropping my connection (I use madwifi). So I do it manually
>> now.
>>
>> Hopefully as network-manager improves, that won't be necessary.
>> I should try it in fc5 to see how well it works - maybe they have
>> made it better.
>
>It's lots better now than in FC4, but there's still some room for
>improvement.
>
>To some extent, how well it works depends on your wireless hardware. 
> Paul Johnson didn't specify in his post, but if he has trouble with
> NM, he can report back for some help.
>
>> I like how moms Dell does it under Windows XP - first time she came
>> to visit, I had to give her my info. Now - whenever she is here, it
>> just figures out to use my network. She doesn't have to do anything.
>> Just works.
>
>That's NetworkManager's objective.  It comes pretty close for many
> users now.

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

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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