(no subject)

[haggholm]

NetworkManager is in the tree, and it is Good. (See Luis Medinas's post on how to get it working in Gentoo.) Unlike the version in the overlays, this one actually works for me—consistently. Hell, I can even connect to the ubcsecure WPA protected campus network (sparing myself an annoying login screen), and I've never managed to connect to that before. (I'm told a lot of Windows users have issues with it, too.)

Oh, and NetworkManager finally seems to store its keys properly in GNOME's keyring. This, too, is Good.

Comments

[evillenick.livejournal.com]

NetworkManager is awesome, I was using it on my Macbook under Ubuntu over the summer, and it just worked... So much easier than the old school config files I used under Redhat 9.0 and Gentoo, and my script files that I used to change configs for different networks ;)

School network

[(Anonymous)]

How did you manage to connect to the ubcsecure AP? I have tried NetworkManager and it did not work for me.

Re: School network

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

There's really nothing to it, for me. I click the NetworkManager icon, and select the ubcsecure AP; it asks me to authenticate (WPA2 Enterprise, I think); I enter my Interchange username as Identity and password as, well, Password, and away it goes. (Well, of course I save the identity information in the GNOME keyring so I don't have to type it in every time…)

It could, of course, be a driver issue. My laptop has an Intel PRO/Wireless chipset, and Intel are pretty good about driver support (there's a firmware blob, but the driver itself is open). If you use in-kernel drivers and compile your own kernel (or your distribution vendor of choice botched it up), you may have to ensure that the correct encryption options are enabled; I suspect the crucial one is TKIP (menuconfig -> Networking -> IEEE 802.11i TKIP encryption or CONFIG_IEEE80211_CRYPT_TKIP=y). If you use a third-party driver package, make sure it supports the necessary encryption.

Re: School network

[(Anonymous)]

Ok thanks. It does work that easy. However, in buildings with not-so-good reception, I have trouble connecting to the ubcsecure AP, so I guess that was the problem. It works fine for other OSs and laptops, so I am not sure what exactly the cause is.

I have Intel PRO/Wireless as well, 3945AGB.

Thanks for your help.

[petter-haggholm.livejournal.com]

No problem—glad I could help!

I don't know why your Linux setup should be more sensitive to poor signals, but I can conjecture. (I can't compare my own experience because I haven't tried other OSs on campus.) There's an option somewhere that sets a threshold signal quality—if it drops below a certain value, it will consider itself effectively disconnected and try to associate with a stronger AP. If it fails to do this—e.g. because there isn't one!—you will be disconnected. Maybe it's as simple as this threshold value being higher in Linux.

With iwconfig, this is controlled by the sens option. With NetworkManager, I'm afraid I don't know (never had much incentive to find out).