Discontinuing kcmwifi for wpa_supplicant, what about knetworkmanager?

[Dirk Mueller]

On Tuesday, 28. March 2006 21:38, Stefan Winter wrote:

> > Sure, I would also consider it to be a bugfix. and if you have a patch to
> > make kwifimanager work for non-root users as well, then that would also
> > be great ;)
> Well. That brings up something I had in my mind for far too long already. I
> am seriously thinking of discontinuing the kcmwifi module for KDE4. The
> reasons for that are many:

I would love to see the good parts from kwifimanager (the systray look&feel) 
merged into knetworkmanager. Maybe I'll do that myself somewhen. 

Right now, kwifimanager is just barely useable, because it can't initiate 
scans when running as non-root user, and therefore can't discover networks at 
all. 

> 3) wpa_supplicant. It's that easy. This software is the supplicant, as the
> name suggests. It also contains a GUI, and even a Qt based one: wpa_gui.
> Fairly easy to use, and despite its name it can not only handle WPA
> networks but also WEP or clear-text networks, IOW: everything. And when it
> comes to WPAx Enterprise authentication, it really shines. There are a lot
> of authentication protocols out there to use for 802.1X authentication, and
> wpa_supplicant supports a wide variety. I seriously doubt that any other
> supplicant (except maybe xsupplicant, but that one doesn't have a real GUI)
> can currently do a better job. For those of you still reading and wondering
> why I started this mail quoting Dirk: you can even use it as non-root. The
> trick being that the wpa_supplicant daemon runs as root, but has a control
> interface, and it is configurable which unix group shall have the right to
> issue control commands. So, put "users" into the control-allowed group and
> you're done: all your users have administrative access to the WLAN NIC.

right. It would be a good possibility indeed. 

> This is an utility that can only handle WEP currently, but at least has a
> daemon running in the background. 

I'm not sure where you read that. It can handle WEP and WPA as well as NFS  
remounts and VPN connectivity. Its slowly becoming the tool of choice for 
people who frequently roam between networks.

> I am aware that KNetworkManager does also other things, i.e. wired LAN.
> That's a plus for it. But doing WLAN layer 2 *right* is damn difficult, so
> it's IMHO a far better idea to trust this to people that can dedicate their
> efforts towards it and not do a one-size-fits-all approach.

I'm not sure where the "difficult" part in WLAN comes from. could you 
elaborate?

> Now, coming to the end, I should say that none of this has to do with
> KWiFiManager, the monitoring app. I will still maintain and further develop
> that.

Sure, except that one cannot run both in parallel, since they will interfer 
with each other. 


-- 
Dirk//\