Re: NetworkManager applet on the Acer Aspire One

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 14:54 +0000, alan wrote:
> 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.

If the applet doesn't list the network, it wasn't found by the wifi card
during the scans, which usually indicates a driver problem.  What
distro, wifi driver, and wifi hardware do you have on this machine?

> 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.

Yeah, that patch isn't upstream (obviously) and I don't know why they
added that.  Normal upstream NetworkManager should work correctly, and
does on F-10 installed on an Aspire One that we have kicking around the
office.

Dan

> 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?
> 
> 
> 
>