Outside of what I've read, does anyone have any insight as to what they've done to improve wireless capabilities? Right now I have a T30 with a mini-PCI wireless card and it works great (SuSE 7.3 using hostap drivers). However, it's all manual scripts to bring up the interface, connect, etc. What I'd love to see down the road is something integrated into the OS (or KDE/Gnome) is something similar to what OS X has. Automatically listing available access points, click to connect, determine if a WEP key is needed, ask for it, and assign IP to that card based on how it's setup in YaST (DHCP or static). This would be huge for usability. If tools like this already exist, please educate me. I haven't found them yet if they do. Thanks. - Greg
After finding a (very nice) Berkeley coffee shop with FREE wireless Internet access I had no excuse any more and got a wireless card (Linksys). All I did was to plug it into the PCMCIA slot, a second later I had a "wlan0" interface to use... I just started dhcp on it ("ifup-dhcpd wlan0") and that was all. I tried it at Starbucks ("Hotspot", T-Mobile) first. When you open a browser and enter any URL you always end up with the T-Mobile sign-on screen, after signing in there I had full connectivity.... with the free Internet in Berkeley that step wasn't necessary of course. Anyway, while this was easy we also have a "wireless" button in the network configuration yast2 screen but I frankly admit I don't understand what it does at all! I tried to figure it out but I get errors. So I use the command line. It's easy, it's just another normal ethernet type network interface, just with a different name. Michael Greg Macek wrote:
Outside of what I've read, does anyone have any insight as to what they've done to improve wireless capabilities? Right now I have a T30 with a mini-PCI wireless card and it works great (SuSE 7.3 using hostap drivers). However, it's all manual scripts to bring up the interface, connect, etc. What I'd love to see down the road is something integrated into the OS (or KDE/Gnome) is something similar to what OS X has. Automatically listing available access points, click to connect, determine if a WEP key is needed, ask for it, and assign IP to that card based on how it's setup in YaST (DHCP or static). This would be huge for usability.
If tools like this already exist, please educate me. I haven't found them yet if they do. Thanks.
- Greg
Thanks Michael, I like 1st hand experience info like this. One thing that you might add is what if any special things did you do when you installed 8.2 in regards to wireless (PCMCIA) if anything ? Did you create any new interfaces ? Etc. Thanks again, Dee W.D.McKinney (Dee) Alaska Wireless Systems (907)349-4308 Office (907)230-5048 Mobile http://www.akwireless.net -----Original Message----- From: Michael Hasenstein [mailto:mha@suse.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 8:51 AM To: Greg Macek Cc: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] 8.2 Wireless improvements? After finding a (very nice) Berkeley coffee shop with FREE wireless Internet access I had no excuse any more and got a wireless card (Linksys). All I did was to plug it into the PCMCIA slot, a second later I had a "wlan0" interface to use... I just started dhcp on it ("ifup-dhcpd wlan0") and that was all. I tried it at Starbucks ("Hotspot", T-Mobile) first. When you open a browser and enter any URL you always end up with the T-Mobile sign-on screen, after signing in there I had full connectivity.... with the free Internet in Berkeley that step wasn't necessary of course. Anyway, while this was easy we also have a "wireless" button in the network configuration yast2 screen but I frankly admit I don't understand what it does at all! I tried to figure it out but I get errors. So I use the command line. It's easy, it's just another normal ethernet type network interface, just with a different name. Michael Greg Macek wrote:
Outside of what I've read, does anyone have any insight as to what they've done to improve wireless capabilities? Right now I have a T30 with a mini-PCI wireless card and it works great (SuSE 7.3 using hostap drivers). However, it's all manual scripts to bring up the interface, connect, etc. What I'd love to see down the road is something integrated into the OS (or KDE/Gnome) is something similar to what OS X has. Automatically listing available access points, click to connect, determine if a WEP key is needed, ask for it, and assign IP to that card based on how it's setup in YaST (DHCP or static). This would be huge for usability.
If tools like this already exist, please educate me. I haven't found them yet if they do. Thanks.
- Greg
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W.D.McKinney wrote:
Thanks Michael,
I like 1st hand experience info like this. One thing that you might add is what if any special things did you do when you installed 8.2 in regards to wireless (PCMCIA) if anything ? Did you create any new interfaces ? Etc.
Absolutely nothing. That's all handled by the PCMCIA package when you insert a card. Michael
Thanks for your reply. While I'm encouraged to hear your card just worked, what I'd love to see is a GUI to help manage some of this. If I could put my hands into programming something like this, I would. But alas, right now my job of web developer/DB admin keeps me too busy to dive into making KDE/GTK frontends for this kind of stuff. I've seen some tools that help in finding WAP's and such... now to add to that somehow automatically bringing up the interface upon a successful connect to the WAP. Oh, and it'd be cool if this would dock into the KDE or Gnome taskbar. :) I love to dream... On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 11:51, Michael Hasenstein wrote:
After finding a (very nice) Berkeley coffee shop with FREE wireless Internet access I had no excuse any more and got a wireless card (Linksys). All I did was to plug it into the PCMCIA slot, a second later I had a "wlan0" interface to use... I just started dhcp on it ("ifup-dhcpd wlan0") and that was all. I tried it at Starbucks ("Hotspot", T-Mobile) first. When you open a browser and enter any URL you always end up with the T-Mobile sign-on screen, after signing in there I had full connectivity.... with the free Internet in Berkeley that step wasn't necessary of course.
Anyway, while this was easy we also have a "wireless" button in the network configuration yast2 screen but I frankly admit I don't understand what it does at all! I tried to figure it out but I get errors. So I use the command line. It's easy, it's just another normal ethernet type network interface, just with a different name.
Michael
Greg Macek wrote:
Outside of what I've read, does anyone have any insight as to what they've done to improve wireless capabilities? Right now I have a T30 with a mini-PCI wireless card and it works great (SuSE 7.3 using hostap drivers). However, it's all manual scripts to bring up the interface, connect, etc. What I'd love to see down the road is something integrated into the OS (or KDE/Gnome) is something similar to what OS X has. Automatically listing available access points, click to connect, determine if a WEP key is needed, ask for it, and assign IP to that card based on how it's setup in YaST (DHCP or static). This would be huge for usability.
If tools like this already exist, please educate me. I haven't found them yet if they do. Thanks.
- Greg
I use 8.1 and have found that PCMCIA wireless works great. You create a
Network card in YAST2, check PCMCIA, and click on the "Wireless Settings"
button for a dialog box to edit your wireless parameters (ESSID, WEP Key,
etc....)
Works like a champ.
This is a big impovement over all previous versions. I'm interested to see
what 8.2 looks like.
On 09 Apr 2003 10:17:43 -0500
Greg Macek
Outside of what I've read, does anyone have any insight as to what they've done to improve wireless capabilities? Right now I have a T30 with a mini-PCI wireless card and it works great (SuSE 7.3 using hostap drivers). However, it's all manual scripts to bring up the interface, connect, etc. What I'd love to see down the road is something integrated into the OS (or KDE/Gnome) is something similar to what OS X has. Automatically listing available access points, click to connect, determine if a WEP key is needed, ask for it, and assign IP to that card based on how it's setup in YaST (DHCP or static). This would be huge for usability.
If tools like this already exist, please educate me. I haven't found them yet if they do. Thanks.
- Greg
-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com
participants (4)
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Greg Macek
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Matthew Carpenter
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Michael Hasenstein
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W.D.McKinney