Re: What exactly are the aims of NM?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 13:53 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I wonder if the aims and hopes of the NM developers
> are documented anywhere?

Various places, including the NM website under Developers/Design Goals,
and in various emails to this mailing list.  For example, from March 12,
2006:

"As we continue to develop NetworkManager, we're going to build it out to
support more use cases.  NM was originally developed for just one
targetted use case; that of laptop and mobile users.  The goal is to
build to support more cases, but still make laptop and mobile cases
drop-dead simple."

> Is it hoped that it will work with all wireless devices
> for which there is a Linux driver (including ndiswrapper)?

Yes, if ndiswrapper supports WEXT, which it appears to.  The latest
version in CVS appears to support WEXT-19 for WPA, which is quite nice.
It means we don't need to special-case ndiswrapper.

> Or will it only work for cards, etc, with certain properties -
> eg ability to go into Monitor mode -
> which are not actually necessary in order to run under Linux?

Monitor mode is not needed.  Any card/driver that supports WEXT should
work; but note that many drivers have little quirks that have to be
fixed up along the way before they will _reliably_ work with
wpa_supplicant and NetworkManager.  For these we need debug logs.

> I have an Orinoco classic Gold PCMCIA card
> (in fact several of them,
> including ones in USB and PCI adapters),
> and I have never been able to get NM to work with them.

That should be supported, though in recent kernels I've had problems
with that card.  Robert Love posted a patch to wpa_supplicant a bit ago
that should have fixed that little incompatibility.  Note that you have
to make sure that only _one_ driver out of hostap/orinoco binds to your
card...  if both bind to it, nothing good happens.  That's a Linux issue
though, and not unique to NM.  Put "blacklist hostap_cs" in
your /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file.

> Also is it intended that NM should work with KDE?

Yes, NM itself is desktop-agnostic.  If you want a native KDE applet,
look for KNetworkManager.  It is not yet packaged in Fedora.

As you've described your setup (FC5 + orinoco + KDE), it appears that NM
should work for you in principle.  There may, however, be bugs that we
need to work through.

Dan