[Mageia-dev] Can't win - or, best of both worlds . . .!

Sat Nov 24 20:38:49 CET 2012

On 11/24/2012 02:37 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
+> On 24/11/2012 05:36, Frank Griffin wrote:
+>> I haven't tested since, because this was the straw on the camel's back
+>> that finally got me to pull enough teeth to find out that NM won't work
+>> in KDE without manual intervention.  Once I got NM to work, I never went
+>> back.
+> For those of us still struggling to get wireless to work, can you give
+> more details, please?  Sorry if you have done so somewhere else and I
+> missed it.
+>
+As I understand it, NM needs to parse ifcfg files to an internal format 
+before it can work correctly with wireless.  I suspect there's a way to  
+do this with the NM CLI, but unless you speak NM well (I don't), it 
+isn't really obvious.
+
+It's easy in GNOME, as GNOME appears to detect that it needs to be done 
+and does it silently.  So if you have GNOME installed, just log in to 
+it, activate the interface from the dropdown at the top right, and log 
+out again.
+
+Otherwise, from KDE, you define the interface with drakconnect (MCC), 
+selecting to allow NM to control it.  Then install 
+plasma-applet-networkmanager (which is not installed by default for KDE 
+because NM is not supposed to be the default for wireless yet). John 
+Balcaen has posted that you don't need to add it to the panel (you can 
+invoke it directly in some way I didn't follow), but before I read that 
+I just used the panel toolbox widget  "Add Widgets" option, search on 
+network", double-clicked to place it
+on the panel, and invoked it from there.  Just tell it to connect the 
+wireless, and the parse should be done automatically.
+
+IIRC, John also posted that knetworkmanager (invoked through KDE system 
+settings) should do as well, but I'm not sure whether the 
+plasma-applet-networkmanager package was still required in that case.  
+Something has probably changed since I did this, since my recollection 
+is that the plasma applet showed a choice of interface controllers with 
+NM selected by default, and that did the required parse.  In current 
+cauldron, both the applet and knetworkmanager give me the same display, 
+and neither mentions NM, so maybe both the panel icon and the system 
+settings option are executing the same thing, and the plasma package was 
+being used under the covers.
+
+I'm a recent refugee to KDE from GNOME3, so there's a lot I don't find 
+intuitive.
+
+There are two questions for which I don't have answers.
+
+Once you've caused the parse to be done, you should be good to go for 
+wireless on subsequent reboots for that SSID.  I'm not sure whether it 
+needs to be redone if you switch SSIDs, but the errors you get from NM 
+if the parse *hasn't* been done refer to errors in an "ifcfg-rh" which 
+appears to be independent of SSID.  So maybe it's a one-time thing, or 
+maybe it's a one-time-per-SSID thing.
+
+The other question is what happens for DEs other than GNOME and KDE.  No 
+clue there.
+
+You can find more details in bug#2160 and bug#8169.
+
+I'm still not sure exactly what happens when.  I just followed John's 
+suggestion to install plasma-applet-networkmanager, and then bumbled 
+around until I noticed it working.  Apart from having to install the 
+applet and invoke *something* (either the applet or knetworkmanager), it 
+all works by magic.  Just not by as much magic as it does in GNOME.
+