Re: Bugs everywhere!



On 4/15/07, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
That's a driver problem.  I can't control what drivers, and what
_quality_ of drivers, Ubuntu puts in their kernel.  The rt2500 driver
apparently doesn't support WE-19 and above, which is the standard Linux
method of configuring a card to support WPA.

You'll note the use iwpriv commands in that bug report.  If every driver
used iwpriv commands, there would be 30 different ways to configure a
card.  That's just insane.  So NetworkManager requires that a driver
support WE-19 and above to use WPA.  In any case, that's the requirement
to show WPA support in the GUI.

To connect successfully with WPA, the driver needs to work with
wpa_supplicant and the wpa_supplicant WEXT driver.  That means, of
course, that the driver again must support WE-19 and above for WPA.
wpa_supplicant is the standard Linux WPA supplicant.

So, in an ideal world with ideal hardware NM "Just Works".
Unfortunately, this isn't an ideal world. If a web browser developer
tried to make a browser which only rendered XHTML 1.0 strict pages and
just refused to load anything else, I think it wouldn't be used by
many people.

I'll try to keep this constructive though. Some Xorg configurators
have a database of monitors for modelines and such info. Of course
it's a huge database since most monitors are unique. Couldn't NM keep
a database of non-wext compliant drivers and their related needs and
abstract those differences out somehow? I know nothing about the tech
involved so perhaps that isn't possible, or perhaps ALL drivers are
slowly migrating to your ideal standard. If this isn't the case
though, NM will never "Just Work".

Cheers,
beerfan



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