Wireless/network connection GUIs

[Paul Tansom]

** chombee <chombee at nerdshack.com> [2007-10-02 14:01]:
> Okay, so the new network-manager we have in Ubuntu now is great, but it
> doesn't work with every wireless card. I do lots of Ubuntu installs for
> people new to computers or moving from Windows, and fairly often their
> wireless card doesn't work with network-manager. So I leave them with
> the old System->Administration->Network, which is really not very good,
> it's confusing and difficult and slow and infuriating.
> 
> There are lots of applications out there that make connecting to
> networks quicker and easier. Does Xubuntu have a network manager it
> uses? What about Kubuntu? Does anyone have any other recommendations?
> 
> What I'm looking for is something that will:
> 
> * Manage wireless connections in a quick and easy way like
> network-manager
> * Ideally manage wired connections too
> * Work with all network cards that work at all with Ubuntu, or at least
> work with more than network-manager does.
<<snip>>
** end quote [chombee]

Arguably not an ideal suggestion since it isn't currently in any of the
Ubuntu repositories, but I'm just taking a look at Wicd [1]. There is a
Ubuntu repository that you can manually add though, which helps.

I'm currently struggling to get one, or preferably all four, of my
wireless cards working with Ubuntu. I have one that appears to be
working fine bar the fact that I need to use wpa and not wep. If you
want to use a wireless card in Linux, and you want to use it with a
native driver, and you want to use wpa, you seem to have a very limited
choice unfortunately.

My choice of cards was made for me by virtue of having them already or
getting them bundled with other items, and being a bit of a techy I am
determined to get them working and document it, rather than go out and
buy a new card - although I may end up having to do that as well (and
I'll justify it by getting a mini pci one to fit internally to the
laptop and run the arial round the screen!).

Oh, as for wicd, it has the advantage for me that it has no Gnome
dependencies and I'm trying to get back to my xfce desktop after
switching to Ubuntu. It does seem a little rough around the edges
though, most obviously in terms of reliability of the icon displayed in
the tray - although that may be related to my card not working yet!

As an aside, can anyone point to some decent documentation on the Prism54
driver? The website is clear as mud and I'm having problems working out whether
it actually supports wpa, which of the variants I should be using with my card
[2], whether I need the custom firmware, how I flash my card with the custom
firmware (if needed) and whether the custom firmware still allows the card to
be used with Windows - amongst other things!

[1] http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

[2]
paul at dusky:~$ lspci
<<snip>>
03:00.0 Network controller: 3Com Corporation 3com 3CRWE154G72 [Office
Connect Wireless LAN Adapter] (rev 01)

paul at dusky:~$ sudo lspci -vn -s 03:00.0
Password:
03:00.0 0280: 10b7:6001 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 10b7:600
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
        Memory at 28000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 1

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