NetworkManager, WPA and non-wext drivers

["Michael T" <raselmsh hotmail com>]

Hello,

I hope that I am not repeating a too-often asked question - I tried googling 
the lists, but didn't find it.  I would like to ask what the plans are for 
supporting WPA with chipsets for which there is no wireless extensions 
driver available.  Currently, things definitely do not Just Work for other 
chipsets.  I do not think that it would be a major problem, since I suspect 
that you have already done the hard work.

I was able to get NetworkManger to connect to my WPA network by:

* adding a couple of lines to src/nm-device-802-11-wireless.c to make it use 
wpa_supplicant's ipw driver instead of wext if the card contains an rtl8180 
chipset (as mine does)
* connecting to the network by manually entering all network and encryption 
details using the KNetworkManager GUI, since the GUI still picked up the 
network as WEP

I'm not sure about the issue of the network still being detected as WEP - in 
fact I'm not even sure if it is an issue with NetworkManager or the KDE GUI 
- but at least adding as much support as I did for known chipsets would be - 
or at least ought to be, although there are probably other issues - a 
relatively trivial matter, and at the moment, restricting most chipsets to 
WEP encryption really is a serious limitation.

I did read a discussion of this on a Debian mailing list.  The outcome was 
that all drivers ought to use wireless extensions for WPA, so the drivers 
should be fixed instead.  I do think though that fixing the drivers is not 
very likely in the near future, and so that solution will not help users who 
want things to Just Work.

It would be nice if you could CC me any answers, since I am not subscribed 
to the mailing list.

Regards,

Michael

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