WPA in kubuntu

[Jonathan Byrne]

On 7/25/2006, "Carlos Barros" <barros001 at gmail.com> wrote:

>I've installed knetworkmanager last night at home, but it just show me a
>trayicon and a popup displaying something like: no devices found, and
>some other useless buttons. I'm using a ndiswrapper driver, maybe this
>can be a problem.

My googling of this problem indicated that knetworkmanager does not
support WPA, so I googled up howtos on wpa_supplicant and got that
working. It also seemed that if it was done through knetworkmanager,
you'd have no connectivity unless and until KDE was up, even if
knetworkmanager did support WPA.

While setting up wpa_supplicant, I sat there thinking "This is fine for
somebody like me, who has been using Linux since 1998 and enjoys this
sort of thing, but the point at which a newcomer to Linux might have
given up and gone back to Windows was reached a long time ago."

The rest of this is kind of a tangent, so if you're not interested, this
would be a good time to stop reading. Unless, of course, you're a
developer involved with implementing wireless in (K)ubuntu, in which
case you really ought to keep reading :-)

Honestly, setting up the wireless network is something that belongs in
the *installer* not something a person should have to google about and
set up from the command line.

The installer should ask a few simple questions like "Do you use a
wireless network?" "B or G?" "Security: WEP, WPA, none" and get
that taken care of at the outset so that you can use wireless
immediately. It should be able to grab the initial updates over
wireless.  As more and more people go over to wireless-only networks,
this is going to become a larger and larger issue. People are going to
expect this functionality out of the box. Heck, I'm an old hand and a
command-line lover whose favorite text editor is vi, and *I* even expect
it out of the box. Wireless is something so central to many home and
even office environments today that it should Just Work in (K)ubuntu.


Best,

Jonathan