KNetworkManager4 is driving me nuts

[Rolf Eike Beer]

Sorry for the bad mood, but I'll try to bring it together as constructive as I 
can.

First some things to my setup: I'm using openSuSE 11.2 i686 with KDE 4.3 and 
KNetworkManager4 from SuSE. I've tried the same things with the version from 
11.1 before but it I never got a connection to my WLAN (see below). Using 
KNetworkManager3 has worked forever but that one is gone in 11.2 now. I don't 
know how much the svn version differs from the one shipped in 11.2 so some 
points may already be solved or be SuSE specific. In this case feel free to 
ignore me.

Yesterday I found Will's blog posting [1], tested it and: yeah, for the first 
time ever I was able to connect to my WLAN using KNetworkManager4. Today it 
connected again. I then scanned a bit through the config options and used 
"limit connection to wlan0" and from this moment on my connection was gone 
again. Reverting that option, restarting network, KNetworkManager, rfkill 
on/off, nothing changed anything.

My Network is still listed in the context menu of the systray icon (name, 
signal strength, encryption sign) but it's not "active" anymore. Clicking on 
it doesn't change anything, right clicking on it has every action (copy IP 
address, properties) deactivated. When I now do "network restart" I'll get 
three notifications (network down, network up, wlan0 connected) and I see the 
systray icon change to the general icon and back. After that context menu is 
still deactivated.

Then I changed everything one more time, again restarted the network and it 
connected again. Now at least "copy IP address" from the context menu of the 
connection is active but "Properties" is still not. Ok, test again: limit 
connection to WLAN0: everything broken again. Revert that: nothing changes. 
Restart network: works again.

Ok, this seems to be at least 4 different problems:

-limiting a network to a connection (even the correct one) renders it unusable

-connections can sometimes be correctly shown even when the network is not 
connected and you have no way of connecting them without restarting the whole 
networkmanager (requires sudo or root permissions)

-when networkmanager is restarted and no connection to connect to can be found 
(e.g. first bug) the entire context menu of the systray icon stays deactivated

-properties for connections from context menu of connection does not work


Still reading? Your luck ;) At the end I still like it. Creating a connection 
is really easy (if it works). The new systray framework rocks. When I hover 
the systray it should not only display "Active" but also the name of the 
network or anything like that. But that's polishing. But what really is 
missing is a way to get any logging or report what is wrong when something is 
not working.

Yes, this was rather negative. My apologies. I really like that program. I 
just want it to work and don't drive me nuts ;)

Eike

P.S.: Please CC me as I'm not on the list. If you just want to flame me: do it 
off-list.

1) http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4112
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