opensuse get about 95% for their effort. best opensuse so far!
but why, for the love of all that holy, put in a buggy networkmanager?
after an update, it gets patched with a more stable version and it fixes the icon size for wireless, but it is still the worst piece of software in there.
i dont like the new networkmanager! it sucks. why do we have to ācreate a connectionā? What a useless time-consuming feature.
we want: right-click and see a list of wireless networks. pick one, type the wlan key and connect.
who-ever were responsible for knetworkmanager should be fired.
===========
please give us a SIMPLE, STABLE and EASY-TO-USE alternative.
As much as i love opensuse, i WONT RECOMMEND it. The connection to the lan / wlan is vital, and now this is the weakest point.
Whatās wrong with it? The network manager does show you a list of wireless networks. I just choose āNew connectionā->wlan0. And then it shows me a list of networks. I donāt see the problem.
Keep in mind, though, that when Red Hat (the maintainers of NetworkManager) updated NM, the updated the Gnome client at the same time to be compatible with the changes.
There was no communication with the KDE community, just a new release. So knetworkmanager was forced to catch up to the new version of NetworkManager, which completely broke compatibility with the previous version of NM. And while there are quirks in knetworkmanager, I think think they did an admirable job in the timeframe they had.
It will improve over timeā¦ If you donāt like knetworkmanager, try the gnome-client instead, it may be more to your liking. Since it was developed in parallel with the new version of NM, it is likely more stable and feature complete.
Network manager missing a few important features and isnāt very reliable, thatās why I use Wicd as alternative. If this one had a system tray interface I would love it if it were included with openSUSE by default
I agree the application has a lot of issues, but have you opened any bug reports with novell (not trying to troll ā Iām serious)? Iāve opened 3 so far on knetworkmanager and will open more as I see issues.
If you havenāt, please do so that they can be tracked and (hopefully) resolved.
Granted itās not ideal, but once you get the hang of it the new network manager works great.
I would like to try Wifi-Radar, but I canāt find it in the repos anywhere.
The one glitch I found in network manager is that āsometimesā you cannot add a wireless network connection by right clicking the applet. Iām think that might just be a first time thing and it will work from now on, but when I first connected my laptop, I entered the WPA Security key in the applet window but it didnāt connect. I had to configure the network through Yast.
I suspect it was just that first time though. If not, the developers will have that fixed in KDE 4.1.
Iāve found the network manager in SuSE 11.0 to work delightfully. A definite improvement over earlier releases.
One feature that would improve it is an auto-connect function that would automatically connect to known wireless networks. It remembers to connect to the last network (?), however it does not connect between different established wireless connections, such as moving a laptop between a home network and an office network.
Still, this is a minor nuisance. Two clicks is all it takes to connect. Keep up the good work.
I know this is an old thread but it came up when I was doing research and I have a habit of posting on those to help out others following in my footstepsā¦
I have found that knetworkmanager sucks on every distro I have tried. I have been using linux for about six months and gone through four or five distros trying to find one with the right combination of not-crap and so far OpenSUSE might be it (about a week into it). I always use KDE, canāt speak for networkmanager on gnome.
The point of this long-winded post: use Wicd!!! I have used Wicd on every distro Iāve tried and IMO it is far superior to the native network managers. I never found a way in any previous distro to set things like auto-connecting to static IP with WPA2 on non-broadcast SSID quickly & in a GUI. The OpenSUSE network manager, through Yast, does have a way to set these things, but Iām not sure itās on a per-network basis and it reminds me of the way windows does it, where you have to set TCP/IP settings hidden in a bunch of options menus.
I had a VERY hard time getting Wicd to run on my installation of OpenSUSE. The permissions for all the script files were not set correctly on installation and my previous installationās scripts did not get removed or overwritten so there were code incompatibilities that took me forever to track down, the runlevels were screwy, and I still get a weird error message sometimesā¦if anyone reads this in the future & needs help message me or something. I might try to fix the installation script & package it myself.
OpenSUSE 11.0
Wicd 1.5.4
Atheros 5007 / AR242x
AMD Athlon 64 Dual-Core TK-57
Linux 2.6.25.18-0.2-pae i686
KDE 4.0.4
11.1 beta 5 is coming with a new network manager and it looks promising, although quite buggy. But Iām sure theyāll have it figured out by the time the real release is err released
> 11.1 beta 5 is coming with a new network manager and it looks
> promising, although quite buggy. But Iām sure theyāll have it figured
> out by the time the real release is err released
Iām not. It is the crappiest part of KDE4 so far for me, better prepare using the KDE3 network manager for another while.
I am running Wicd now and although I still have to pull a few strings to make it work it is much much easier to use than the native network manager. I think it should replace knetworkmanager on every distro. If there is interest I can work on it more and try to come up with a howto or rpm.
It just works for me on my Lenovo. Faultless. And better than the windows equiv.
But I agree, that WIFI/Networking is a major problem for many. The blame really lies with hardware manufacturers having a one track mind. Couple that with the lack of communication between the red hat maintainers of networkmanager and kde.- And there you have it.
