[Mageia-dev] Can't win - or, best of both worlds . . .!

[Frank Griffin]

On 11/24/2012 02:37 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On 24/11/2012 05:36, Frank Griffin wrote:
>> I haven't tested since, because this was the straw on the camel's back
>> that finally got me to pull enough teeth to find out that NM won't work
>> in KDE without manual intervention.  Once I got NM to work, I never went
>> back.
> For those of us still struggling to get wireless to work, can you give
> more details, please?  Sorry if you have done so somewhere else and I
> missed it.
>
As I understand it, NM needs to parse ifcfg files to an internal format 
before it can work correctly with wireless.  I suspect there's a way to  
do this with the NM CLI, but unless you speak NM well (I don't), it 
isn't really obvious.

It's easy in GNOME, as GNOME appears to detect that it needs to be done 
and does it silently.  So if you have GNOME installed, just log in to 
it, activate the interface from the dropdown at the top right, and log 
out again.

Otherwise, from KDE, you define the interface with drakconnect (MCC), 
selecting to allow NM to control it.  Then install 
plasma-applet-networkmanager (which is not installed by default for KDE 
because NM is not supposed to be the default for wireless yet). John 
Balcaen has posted that you don't need to add it to the panel (you can 
invoke it directly in some way I didn't follow), but before I read that 
I just used the panel toolbox widget  "Add Widgets" option, search on 
network", double-clicked to place it
on the panel, and invoked it from there.  Just tell it to connect the 
wireless, and the parse should be done automatically.

IIRC, John also posted that knetworkmanager (invoked through KDE system 
settings) should do as well, but I'm not sure whether the 
plasma-applet-networkmanager package was still required in that case.  
Something has probably changed since I did this, since my recollection 
is that the plasma applet showed a choice of interface controllers with 
NM selected by default, and that did the required parse.  In current 
cauldron, both the applet and knetworkmanager give me the same display, 
and neither mentions NM, so maybe both the panel icon and the system 
settings option are executing the same thing, and the plasma package was 
being used under the covers.

I'm a recent refugee to KDE from GNOME3, so there's a lot I don't find 
intuitive.

There are two questions for which I don't have answers.

Once you've caused the parse to be done, you should be good to go for 
wireless on subsequent reboots for that SSID.  I'm not sure whether it 
needs to be redone if you switch SSIDs, but the errors you get from NM 
if the parse *hasn't* been done refer to errors in an "ifcfg-rh" which 
appears to be independent of SSID.  So maybe it's a one-time thing, or 
maybe it's a one-time-per-SSID thing.

The other question is what happens for DEs other than GNOME and KDE.  No 
clue there.

You can find more details in bug#2160 and bug#8169.

I'm still not sure exactly what happens when.  I just followed John's 
suggestion to install plasma-applet-networkmanager, and then bumbled 
around until I noticed it working.  Apart from having to install the 
applet and invoke *something* (either the applet or knetworkmanager), it 
all works by magic.  Just not by as much magic as it does in GNOME.