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

[Dan]

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
>
> 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.
>
>>
>>
>>
>
I use NetworkManager and NetworkManager-vpnc to connect to my wired and 
wireless VPN (Cisco) networks. Works near flawlessly for me. Seems to 
have a problem with some atheros chipsets in FC5 though. Also, I 
couldn't get WPA working (WEP works fine, though I just plug in to my 
router usually), but I think there were some changes in how WPA is 
handled for the ipw2200 chipset, and I will be trying again shortly. 
Turn on NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services for startup 
in system-config-services, and turn off network, all just in runlevel 5 
(they try to do the same thing so might end up connecting you twice). 
This is the same thing that the chkconfig command does.
-Dan