regarding network configuration(wireless) and default pacakges.

[Matthew Nicholson]

dear -devel team/list members,

after reading and replying to Bart Vullings post about his wifigui
application, i got thinking about a few things regarding  laptops and
dapper/dapper+1 and wireless.

recently i believe Suse made network-manager its default for managing
network connections, which, in my opinion is a great move. this is the
first piece of software that has made networking a laptop completely
pain free and very user friendly/windows-esc. if i'm "jacked-in" it
knows it and deals with it. if i'm wireless, its knows it and connects
as needed. i love it. what would be stopping this application, or,
something like it, from becoming a default installed package? having
something like this installed by default would be a great leap forwards
for laptop users, in my opinion. 

another, related question is ndiswrapper. i need it (as i'm sure many
other do) to use my wireless connection with ubuntu (least, until the
bcm/airport drivers get more work and are stable). i know with chipsets
such as ipw2100(centrino) and other "built-in" modules/drivers will load
during the install, and be used to fetch any packages form the Internet
and will be all set to go after the install (other than having a really
nice connection manager installed by default :-) ) my question is, what
prevents ndiswrapper from being included by default? i know that without
the .inf/.sys files, ndiswrapper is useless, and i know that those
binary drivers cannot be distributed on the cd. what i would be looking
for, is an install option to install ndiswrapper by default, and a
dialog to copy the .inf/.sys files or to directly "install" them with
ndiswrapper. this could be from cd/floppy/harddisk. i imagine most users
have the windows driver cds for their laptops,which is more than likely
where they would be getting their drivers form anyways. being able to
insert the cd, and locate the drivers, during install, would be great.
also being able to point the installer to a place on the disk (a
previous /home, a read only ntfs partition, etc) would be excellent. 

at the very least, i think it would be great if there was a way to alert
the user to the status of their wireless device. just a simple "Ubuntu
has detected the presence of a wireless drive it does not support out of
the box. please see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/SomeNdisWRapperInfo for more
information and instructions" would be better than the current state.

if this is to the wrong list (maybe theres a laptop list i don't know
about) or if anyone can point me in the right direction to at least talk
to the right people about this, it would be great.

great work thus far. dapper is progressing nicely and i can't wait to
see what else is in store.

thanks. 

matthew nicholson
sjoeboo at sjoeboo.com
sjoeboo.com

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