Fedora is currently using the ifcfg plugin for NetworkManager that stores system wide network settings in the old network scripts format. This is clearly useful when upgrading a machine with a working configuration from an old Fedora release. However the legacy format makes it difficult to understand the settings and restricts the functionality somewhat. NetworkManager also includes an alternative system wide settings plugin called keyfile. This stores system wide connections in ini format files in the /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections directory. These are a lot easier to understand and read, and provide much better functionality (eg. system wide WPA is trivial), and most importantly of all provides a much more user friendly and consistent GUI giving an excellent user experience. I switched to keyfile with the Fedora 9 release since ifcfg was not working for WPA. Back then it was necessary to write the config files by hand which took quite some figuring out. With Fedora 10 it's now as simple as configure the network in NetworkManager in the usual way, then just tick the 'Available to all users' box in the NetworkManager edit settings dialogue. Are there any plans to switch to keyfile as the default for new installs with Fedora 11? It would seem sensible to leave ifcfg for upgrades, perhaps with an easy way to automatically switch to keyfile if desired. Cheers, Martin PS. These two very minor bugs in F10 are all that separates keyfile from an excellent user experience for me, on several different machines: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=465633 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471734 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
