Re: Association timeout with madwifi

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 15:24 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 12:05 -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> >> On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Simon Geard wrote:
> >
> > No, it does not parse that configuration file.  The configuration
> > information is entered into the dialogs that the nm-applet presents when
> > you first try to connect to an access point.
> 
> I never got any dialogs from NM for anything, including the wired network.

You won't get any for the wired network, and you will only get dialogs
for access points if you (a) force connect to one by picking it from the
menu, or (b) have connected to it before but the key changes or the
connection fails.

> >> If nm does not parse /etc/sysconfig/wpa_suplicant, where am I supposed to
> >> put the -Dwext?
> >
> > Use of the 'wext' wpa_supplicant driver is hardcoded into
> > NetworkManager.  It may be that your distribution has added a check for
> > the 'madwifi' drivers, and patched NM to use -Dmadwifi instead since
> > madwifi-ng has only worked with the 'wext' driver for a few months.  If
> > that's the case, you'll need to take that patch out of the NM sources
> > and rebuild NM.  All wireless drivers should be supporting Linux
> > Wireless Extensions (WEXT), and if they don't, they should be fixed
> > upstream to do so.
> 
> Am I correct in assuming NetworkManager-gnome-0.6.3-1.fc5 for Fc5 is patched?

Correct.  While madwifi-ng drivers that work with -Dwext could be
compiled and used on FC5, the patch isn't likely to come out since
pushing that update would immediately break existing systems with older
madwifi-ng drivers, and we don't do that in a release product.

> I see that the rawhide version has this note in the changelog:
> 
> Drop special-case-madwifi.patch, since WEXT code is in madwifi-ng trunk now.

Correct; rawhide removes that patch since updated madwifi-ng drivers
that work with -Dwext are available.  Users of rawhide and madwifi
should get the latest madwifi-ng drivers.

> If I wanted to install the NM package from rawhide do I need to upgrade
> any other packages in addition to NM?? Is it necessary to rebuild the rawhide
> NM to install it on a laptop running FC5?

You may run into issues with newer libraries of gnome or GTK linked into
the applet.  The best bet is to grab the Rawhide SRPM, install it, and
then 'sudo rpmbuild -ba --target
i386 /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/NetworkManager.spec' followed by 'sudo rpm
-Fhv /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/NetworkManager*.rpm'.

Dan