Why I can't use NM (but want to)

["David R. Litwin" <presently42 gmail com>]

Hello. Let me start off by stating that this is not a flame; nor is it an attempt to deride your work. Rather, I wish to explain the reasons NM fails for me; that they may be fixed and your programme made better.

Firstly, my set up. I use Debian Sid (unstable) with kernel 
2.6.20, KDE 3.5.6 (so KNetworkManager). My card is an Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01) (lspci) so I use the madwifi-ng driver via subversion.

Now, the problems.

At home:

My wireless router seems to like to disconnect my internet connexion every now and again. I do not know why; nor do I know that it is the routers fault. I have not been able to determine the problem (in fact, if any one wants to try to diagnose the problem, I'd be very grateful). Any way, when it does disconnect, NM often tries to reconnect me but fails (why, I do not know. I only recently found out that it outputs errors to the syslog file.). In addition, it seems to me that nm will disconnect (or be discinnected and not attempt or succeed at reconnecting) if I lock the session. This is not good as I often leave my lappy on when I'm at school so I can download a torrent, for example. To solve: I need to have a constant connexion. In both cases, it needs to be able to reconnect.

At school:

My college uses the kind of connexion which demands that one log in to the network in order to use the internet (i. e. to get an I. P. address, if I remember correctly.). With NM, I can not do this. KNetworkManager shows the establlishment of a connexion to be at 57% (if I'm lucky and it makes it past 28%) and then, as it tries to get an IP, fails. I try to open my browser to log in, but the log in page does not display. Therefore, I can not get connected to the network and internet there whilst using NM. To solve: Allow me to log in to the network.

I will aid you in any way I can to solve these problems as I feel NM is an EXTREMALY important part of Linux. It is absurd that I should have to fiddle so much with various internet related connexions. It should just plain work. I am aware, though, that what I have written is not nearly detailed enough to be of use; please tell me what you need to know that I may inform you and help solve these problems.

Cheers and many thanks.

-- 
—A watched bread-crumb never boils.
—My hover-craft is full of eels.
—[...]and that's the he and the she of it.