Wireless newbies -- just try NetworkManager!

[John W. Linville]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:51:45AM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> John W. Linville wrote:

> I've read many postings on WiFi.
> Some say NM is working fine for them.
> Others say NM is not working for them, but "service network" is.
> Still others swear by wicd.

...which has nothing to do whatsoever with which one you should
try first...

> I'm afraid I would want a rational reason to prefer one over the other.

How about "because NM does the right thing for most people most of
the time with minimal effort (as long as you don't get in it's way)"?
Or "because I'm the person that will get your bugzilla, so please
just do as I ask?"

> I have 7 WiFi devices.
> Most work with NM, some do not.
> The device I am using at this moment, an Orinoco Silver PCMCIA card
> in a ThinkPad T43 running Fedora-8, does not work with NM, 
> but does work with the standard network service.
> (This is the default in Fedora-8, I think.)

I'm happy for you.

> > Quite often someone will create a mess trying all the hard ways to
> > get wireless working before they try NetworkManager.  Too often they
> > don't clean-up after their failed attempts, resulting in a nightmare
> > of conflicting wireless configuration options all trying to control
> > the wireless device at the same time.
> 
> You are saying, as far as I can see,
> that some files created by other WiFi applications,
> will interfere with NM.
> Which files?
> I'd prefer to be told exactly what needs to be "cleaned up"
> before one uses NM.
> It seems to me that this should be laid down in the NM documentation.

Well now I guess that depends on which ones you tried, whether or not
you left them running, and how badly you mangled your configuration.
How am I to know these things?

FWIW, the most likely culprits are running the wpa_supplicant service
(i.e. "service wpa_supplicant start" or "chkconfig wpa_supplicant
on") and/or not specifying "ONBOOT=no" for wireless devices when
using system-config-network.

Again, the original post was addressed to "wireless newbies" and
contained advise for what people should try first.  The point is to
keep people from creating messes that need to be cleaned-up in the
first place...

> To me, one of the great advantages of Linux over Windows
> is that everything in Linux is - or should be - transparent.
> Hopefully, an application will work "out of the box".
> But if it doesn't, and one has enough time,
> one can find exactly where it broke down.

If you can figure things out, then do things your own way.  If you
want my help, then please do as I ask.  I really don't see how this
is controversial or why you seem to have taken offense.

John
-- 
John W. Linville
linville at redhat.com