Re: A comment on NetworkManager

["Darren Albers" <dalbers gmail com>]

On 5/11/06, Darren Albers <dalbers gmail com> wrote:

So when is it going to be made compatible with kde, AND ndiswrapper so

all of us using broadcom radios can share in the apparent glee here.  My
experience with NM has been uniformly negative, with every attempt to
run it destroying all networking and requireing a full powerdown reset
to restore it.

The problem is not N-M it is NDISWrapper supporting a full set of Wireless Extensions, I think that the latest (Or maybe it is the version in CVS) fully support the latest version of WEXT and work with N-M.

So if you have a new version of NDISWrapper and run KNetworkManager you should be good to go.

I  think I should expand on this a bit, awhile back Robert Love posted a large patch with a set of workarounds for many of the drivers that do not support the latest WEXT.  I think these were Madwifi, NDISWrapper, and one other (Orinco?).  Dan has taken the position that N-M itself should strictly support WEXT only to avoid supporting the 25 different cards and their unique implementations (I think his reasoning is valid), but he has no issues with individual distributions patching N-M for direct support to increase the usability for their users.   This is why some distro's (Ubuntu Dapper and I think SUSE) have an install of Network Manager that works with NDISWrapper, MadWifi and many other cards that N-M itself does not support.

While many may disagree with Dan's stance it has already had a positive result for NDISWrapper and MadWifi, users of N-M who had to use either of those two drivers put together patches for those drivers and submitted them.  Both were accepted and committed, to me this is a perfect example of why the Open-Source model works so well.

So if you want a working setup with KDE and NDISWrapper you have a couple of options:
1) Use a distro that has support for both like Ubuntu Dapper or SUSE.
2) Build Network Manager by hand and apply Robert's patch to it and use KNetworkManager
3) Upgrade the version of NDISWrapper you are using and use KNetworkManager.


I hope this helps!