NetworkManager applet on the Acer Aspire One



Hello Charly and Dan, I'm sorry to bother you both and please excuse me
if I'm doing this the wrong way. Dan I'm copying you on this because
I've noticed in my research that you've been very helpful to people
with questions in the past, including Charly.

Having recently purchased an Acer Aspire One I was keen to see if I
could use my Nokia mobile phone as a method of providing network access
when out of range of a normal wireless access point. I found a tool,
called JoikuSpot, which sets itself up as an ad-hoc wireless AP on the
phone then routes via 3G to the internet. Great I thought.

That's when the fun started.

On trying to connect to my new ad-hoc AP I first found that the
nm-applet doesn't list them. So then I tried to add a connection,
except you can't add ad-hoc connections. So that wasn't any good.

Then I did some googling and found some instructions for doing it by
hand. Unfortunately they don't work for everyone (I managed to
completely hang the Aspire at one point) and they involve switching off
NetworkManager altogether which I'm not keen on. So I kept on digging.

I found the source RPM for NetworkManager on the Acer download site and
had a look. That's where I noticed a linpus.patch file which included
extra code for the nm-applet. In particular there's a section, authored
by Charly Liu, which adds the function wireless_network_list_fill to
applet.c, and I noticed in there that it filters out all the ad-hoc
access points. I'm sure there must be a good reason but I don't know
enough to understand why it does so.

I'm toying with the idea of taking that filter out just to see what
happens. I'm not keen to do it myself since I haven't got a good build
environment and don't want to trash the Aspire if I can avoid it. I've
seen mention of people being able to connect successfully to ad-hoc
networks via NetworkManager under normal Fedora so I'm at a loss to
understand why this limitation exists on the Aspire. If I'm going to
then a kind word of encouragement (or dire warnings against) would be
very helpful.

Oh, and before anyone suggests that it's because the driver doesn't
fully support ad-hoc. Both nm-tool and iwlist can see the ad-hoc AP ok
and they report a real (as opposed to zero) signal strength.

Thanks for your attention guys. I hope you'll find this interesting
enough to suggest things I might try.

Regards,  Alan Griffiths

PS: I'm not being (very) critical but wouldn't it help new developers
to put a just few more comments in the code?



      


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