Issue : wireless networking "on-the-fly"

[Lionel Dricot (aka Ploum)]

Hello (again ;-) ),

Today I would like to talk you about ducks... (herm, too much brazil, forget
it)

I would like to raise one big issue that was in Ubuntu since the stone ages
: wireless connectivity.


I've installed a incredible number of Ubuntu during the last 15 months, for
my friends, for people who came to my install parties, for my family, etc...
The very bad thing is that I cannot remember one wifi-enabled install where
I didn't use the command line.

There's several issues :

- A very long boot because it waits for a timeout on eth0 (while eth0 is
obviously not connected)
- No way to easily fiddle between eth0 or wlan0
- network-admin is pure crap. I don't know anyone that understand how to
make different places with it.
- network-admin is pure crap, 2 : it takes ages (really ages) to change
between two connections and, most of the time, the change simply not occur
or the connection is lost.
- network-admin is pure crap, 3 : often, it will eats 100% of the CPU
without reason and without doing anything.
- NetworkManager is maybe good but I don't understand what I have to do. The
only thing it does, for now, is to reset my resolv.conf to a empty file.
- I cannot understand how those network-admin, NM, wifi-radar, ... work with
the standard /etc/init.d/networking


I've seen this page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkMagic for a long time now
but nothing seems to happen.
I could understand if the problem was an hard one. But, most of the time, I
solved it by writing a quick and dirty bash script that change the
/etc/network/interface file and I do several shortcuts that make : "sudo
./change_network.sh location1", "sudo ./change_network.sh location2", ...
I know that things with a lot of D-Bus, Hal, and this sort of things are
better. My bash script solution is awful. Badly, it's the only one who seems
to work for a lot of people...

So, can anyone tell me :

- What are the plans for this goal.
- What are the big problems that I don't understand
- What is already done.
- What must be done (and what I can do ;-) )

I really hope to see a default Dapper install where networking is really
easy. I'm not a MacOSX fan at all, but I must admit that it works really
good in this particular case. So, if they did it, we can do it 2X better, as
usually ;-)

Lionel
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