Laptop computers are dropping in price and rising in sales. Wireless ( is | is becoming) the de facto standard for home networking. Before Core 3 gets past the point of no return, I have to ask, "Where does Fedora Core 3 development stand on this technology?' For a laptop and even a desktop it seems that a clear cut idea of how this technology should work needs be addressed. I understand that the availibility of drivers is somewhat hampered by the manufacturers. Looking beyond that point, I really see an oversight in how wireless networking is being treated from the configuration standpoint. We are really looking at a dichotomy of viewpoints in how this aspect of networking should work. On the system administration side it is preferable that the administrator has control over the setup. There is no variance from the initial setup, and the networking configurations can be stopped and started but not tampered with. These configurations should benefit from the flexibility of wireless to scan and use network identifiers like the AP hardware address or the ESSID to automagically know how to connect based on existing network configurations. On the other hand, we see the user perspective that wants the simplicity of easily using a coffe shop, or friends wireless connectivity. I see NetworkManager as a solution to the latter of these issues. It gives a nice easy gui, and password/key management for the user. I have proposed a patch as a first stab for the first issue. If there is no immediate plans for moving away from the ifup/ifdown managment of network interfaces, I really feel that the wireless configuration needs to be more dynamic than the existing scripts provide us. As a wireless laptop user, switching wireless configurations from location to location has definitely been less than user-friendly. Setting up multiple profiles to choose from in grub is do-able, but not really what I am looking for. I would really like to see a much more dynamic network boot process that wireless networking really demans when Fedora Core 3 is released. -Jon On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:14:34 -0400, Jon Nettleton <jon.nettleton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 20:59:57 +0200, Kyrre Ness Sjobak > <kyrre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Love to see it. will you post the link here? > > > > ons, 15.09.2004 kl. 17.02 skrev Jon Nettleton: > > > > > > > If have put together a function and some new code for > > > is_wireless_device that uses iwlist to scan available access points > > > and then ifup a new configuration file if it finds one matching > > > ifcfg-DEVICE_ESSID. My questions are. > > > > > > 1) Is this the correct list? > > > 2) Is this something that maintainers are interested in adding? > > > 3) What is prefered format for patches? > > > > > > Hope to help out making Fedora Core 3 the best it can be. > > > > > > -Jon > > > > > > > > > Here is my first set of working patches. > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=132661 > > I realize that NetworkManager will eventually help solve this problem. > But I think this is a quick and relatively simple way to get booted > up and associated with the proper wireless network. >
