I must be overlooking something...

[vakkotaur]

I've had trouble with wireless networking since starting to use, or try to use, it. The first, I thought, turned out to be an issue with the wireless router at home. With that working, I expected there wouldn't be too much trouble getting wireless working other places such as at hotels. Wrong. I've had exactly zero success with wireless networking other than at home.

Worse, my last attempt to get wireless working elsewhere seems to have broken it for me at home. This is all command line, and while I am not opposed to that, I don't see why much of this needs to be. At the very least, I suspect there is a nice graphical tool whose name I do not yet know what will at least allow the saving of profiles for different locations, if not help with getting them going. That way at least I could (more) easily revert to a working setup at home.

I am assuming something so useful exists as it makes far too much sense for it not to. But my searches haven't turned up anything. Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms. Or else this is one of those glaring deficiencies that needs to be remedied in the Linux world.

So, is there such a thing for linux? And not something utterly dependent upon KDE or GNOME? If it matters, the distribution is a Slackware variant and my window manager is XFCE.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't use wireless, so much of what I say may be bosh and conjecture.

However, my limited observation is that each wireless adapter is distributed with a driver for Windows and a GUI utility for Windows that allows you to set parameters like which channel to use, whether to encrypt, etc. Most have some sort of automatic search that will scan the likely choices and try to find a working setup.

Each of those is probably proprietary code and specific to the individual manufacturer and model. If the equivalent doesn't exist for Linux, it is because the hardware vendor refuses to support Linux (typical) and probably refuses to release any particulars that would allow someone else to write one for Linux (also typical.) Much the same thing happens with UPS units and lots of USB gadgetry. Until someone manages to reverse engineer the thing, you are operating by guesswork if you can get it to work at all. Because there are standards for the actual RF interface that is used, different manufacturer's equipment does usually work together. But there exists no standard for the software API to the device. The same was true of video chipsets until fairly recently, but now almost all will work with the VESA standard driver, eliminating the hit or miss of dozens of different video drivers for X.

I agree this is stupid on the part of the hardware vendors, but they figure that Windows is all they need to support. After all, Microsoft tells them that Linux doesn't matter and is only a toy.

Not all vendors are that way, of course. My PC has one of those obnoxious "WinModem" built in modem chips, and they are all proprietary stuff. However, it is an Intel chip and sure enough, Intel provides a Linux driver that does work. I had to compile it, and that necessitated one code tweak to make it work with Slackware, but it works just fine (or at least as well as a software-driven modem is likely to work.)

In some areas (notably multimedia) there are groups working on interfaces that let Windows DLLs and drivers function in Linux. I don't know if that is the case for network cards and devices, though.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I don't recall the make of wireless card I am using, but the driver was already there in the default install, all I had to do was enable it. And configure a bunch of stuff. iwconfig seems to be unreliable. Sometime it makes the change I feed it, sometimes it seems to merrily ignore what I tell it. Not reject as an error, ignore while it looks it was happy with the parameters.

Failing a nice graphical program to save and select profiles (save as some name that won't get changed by normal procedures, copy the stuff into the files that do get changed/used, restart what needs restarting) then I could use a step-by-step guide to making things work. The wireless connections at hotels are about as open as I expect to see. I should be able to disable needing a key and just set the ESSID... and yet I have ad no success. The two places where I had any connection at all, it was because I had a port to plug an ethernet cable into. Every guide I've seen either assumes it's "set and forget" and if I never left home, it would be. But I do travel on occasion and I'd like to have this wireless thing be as useful as is claimed. Right now I am starting to think that if I want wireless to work as claimed, I need to get an Apple laptop and be done with it, if only I could afford it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

In Linux terms, wireless is a new development that makes a shifting target. Because vendors don't cooperate much with Linux developers, it does take longer to catch up with them. I'm sure there will eventually be the sort of interface you want, if it doesn't already exist. If it does exist, it's probably something in an experimental state that you have to download and compile yourself.

As I said, I can't speak to iwconfig because I don't use it. But whoever is responsible for the code does need to be notified of failures and bugs when they are found.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Oh, and there is a thing called ndiswrapper to use Windows wireless drivers on Linux. As I already have the drive native, I don't see a need to use ndiswrapper myself. The wireless CARD works fine. The wireless CONFIGURATION of Linux itself is the problem.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Just a thought and maybe I'm all wet. But what if you did use ndiswrapper and loaded the Windows configuration tool using wine?

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Under GNOME, System>Configuration>Network leads you to a GUI in which you can define multiple "locations" and presumably set the networking configuration appropriately for each.

I expect that underneath it is keeping separate files with each configuration and when you switch, setting the pertinent text files to match the configuration and restarting the network... in which case it's certainly possible to write a program that does the same and isn't dependent on a GUI.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

Sure enough... netenv may be what you want.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

So close. It looks like that handles all the stuff I have no trouble with, but not the wireless settings that my problem. I found yet another page about wireless on Ultima/Slackware and will be seeing how useful it is this weekend. Hopefully it will help me get things working again, at least at home. If I ever get this figured out, I suspect there will be some Python hacking in an attempt to keep things working.