configuring PCMCIA Wireless card Ubuntu 5.04

[Derek Broughton]

David wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:48:19AM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> David wrote:
>> 
>> > For reasons I could never figure out, it turned out that I needed to
>> > activate ethernet before wireless would work. I have no idea why, and I
>> > don't actually ever use the ethernet.
>> 
>> That's why.  You _do_ use the ethernet.  802.11 (wifi) is merely a
>> protocol
>> for using ethernet (802.3) over wireless.  You can't have wifi until you
>> have ethernet.
> 
> Then that makes perfect sense. But it would seem to be make sense for
> activating a wireless connection to automatically activate ethernet
> networking without having to explicitly do it, wouldn't it? I mean.. is
> this a bug in the network configuration panel? Isn't it also problematic
> that I end up with conflicting default routes? Should I be posting this
> somewhere as a bug?

I would think there's a bug _somewhere_ but I can't help you - it's hard to
say what is missing in the case where you don't manually configure
ethernet.  I have a PCI ethernet, so it's always activated at startup.  My
first guess would be that your wifi adaptor isn't forcing some ethernet
related kernel module to be installed, which forcing up an eth0 interface
is doing for you, but I can't imagine why that would happen.

btw, ifplugd might eliminate your need to delete the default route eth0 (for
a slightly cleaner kludge, rather than a real fix to your problem :-) )
-- 
derek