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Some wireless usability questions..

bsander

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Monday, March 14th 2005, 3:20pm

Some wireless usability questions..

Hey everyone,

Using linux on my laptop, I'm trying to set up my wireless capabilities in an easy-to-use way on KDE (and Gentoo) and I'm having some issues.

I have the luxury of living in an area with quite some wireless networks for me to connect to. Also on my university there are multiple networks that I should be able to connect to. Now this is all great, but to connect to a network I need a root console and do

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# iwlist scan
# iwconfig eth1 essid network-name
# /etc/init.d/net.eth1 restart
Now I know about kwifimanager, waveselect and some other apps to do most of this for me, but I still need root privileges for those to work correctly.
So what's the best thing to do here? Is there a way to circumvent root privileges for this? Should I become a member of a certain group? Should I suid the needed tools (iwlist? iwconfig? iw*? ifconfig? dhcpcd? /etc/init.d/net.eth1?) Any other suggestions? I've seen that on OSX switching networks is a two-click task. How near can I get to that on linux?

Also, on my university, On some networks a rather sophisticated authentication method is used. I'm no guru in this area so it hardly makes any sense to me but I caught the terms certificate, TTLS and PAP. With help from these forums and the ipw2100 mailinglist I (barely) managed to get it working using xsupplicant. There were still problems, like not being able to reconnect after I got out of the associated accesspoint's reach. It also required me to execute quite a lot of initialization commands. This was with xsupplicant 0.8. After xsupplicant 1 got stable on x86, it failed to parse my .conf file and I haven't got it working yet. I'm considering using wpa_supplicant since it looks a little simpler, but here too, is there any way for me to simplify these processes? (Yes, I could throw everything in a shellscript, for which I would again need root privileges, but I'd rather have some GUI for this if it's available)

So basically, I can manage but I'd like it to work a little more smooth. I'm looking for tips, hints, or just general opinions on the usability of wireless networking on linux as a whole and, more specifically, KDE. How do you guys make connecting to your networks easier?

anda_skoa

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Location: Graz, Austria

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Tuesday, March 15th 2005, 8:25pm

You could try to run the command line tools scripts using sudo
AFAIK this is the way OSX handles root operations for users.

And there is an application calles KNetworkConf somewhere in KDE's extra gear modules (maybe there are ebuilds for it as well), which aims at being a GUI for configuring network, so it might be helpful here as well.

Cheers,
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Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User