Re: Little white window SECRET

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 12:31 +0100, Brian Morrison wrote:
> On Wed, 23 May 2012 13:02:03 +0200
> Timothy Murphy <gayleard eircom net> wrote:
> 
> > Brian Morrison wrote:
> > 
> > >> I don't know what password is wanted, even if I could enter one.
> > > 
> > > It wants the password, or phrase, for your wireless connection
> > > whether it is Wi-Fi or some other flavour.
> > > 
> > > You should be able to type in the field, it may not show the whole
> > > string entered, but it should be there. Cut and paste would probably
> > > help if you have your password/phrase/key somewhere accessible.
> > 
> > As I said, it does not allow any input into the window,
> > even if I click "show password",
> > which is in fact the only thing I can do in the window.
> 
> Ah, I didn't realise that you couldn't, I thought you were saying that
> the window was very small and didn't allow you to see what was entered.
> 
> > 
> > Do you see this "Secret" window?
> > If so, does it accept input?
> 
> I am not currently using NM but back in the dim and distant past I used
> it for WiFi on my laptop, I did occasionally get a similar window, I
> think it was used by the GNOME key storage program rather than directly
> by NM. 
> 
> > 
> > Who provides this window, incidentally?
> > Is it NM?
> 
> See above.

The things that ask for secrets are provided by the desktop
environments.  So there's one for GNOME Shell, one for GNOME classic,
one for KDE, and so forth.  For KDE it's kde-plasma-networkmanagement
and part of the KDE sources.

Dan

> > 
> > I'm afraid this incident highlighted for me
> > how bad NM is when it doesn't work.
> > (I emphasize that this is only 5% or less of the time.
> > 95% of the time it works fine.)
> 
> I'd guess that this could be a problem in your wireless driver rather
> than directly in NM itself, but I'm not the best person to ask about it.
> 
> Perhaps someone else could comment if you add in a bit more information
> about which hardware you have and which driver versions you're using. I
> think it's known that some wireless drivers are less solid than others,
> but it's probably also AP dependent too. WiFi standards are, well, not
> actually standards at all, the WiFi Alliance testing is more like a set
> of interoperability tests with 'gold' APs and hence it's possible for
> specific problems to fall through the cracks.
>