Re: default stage3 (was : [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo still on the right path?)

[Manuel McLure <manuel@mclure.org>]

William Kenworthy wrote:
> Actually, as someone who uses wireless across a number of nets, wireless
> on gentoo sucks hugely.  
> 
> Was at a presentation the other day and saw an Ubutu user just walk in,
> a couple of quick commands and he had connected - after much work I
> still cant do that to a particular no-encryption net.  I am hoping the
> last wpa_supplicant version I have installed will make the difference -
> manual iwconfig does work by the way, just not via the gentoo files!
> 
> A mess of config files
> (/etc/conf.d/wireless, /etc/conf.d/net, /etc/wpa_supplicant, ...),
> different versions of software work in only some combinations - only
> 0.4.5 (~x86) will work with 2.6.14, some other versions will do WPA_PSK,
> but not no encryption.- - I suspect the gentoo config design is the main
> stumbling block.
> 
> I realise wireless is complicated (read the above files for instance,
> but gentoo has complicated things further (try and work out which of the
> above files a particular variable will work ... note that for
> wpa_supplicant, not all permutations are listed in the otherwise
> comprehensive instructions)

Interesting, as the distro I was specifically comparing to was Kubuntu - 
getting it to connect to my WPA-PSK network at home was a PITA, while 
Gentoo worked beautifully - emerge ndiswrapper, run ndiswrapper -i to 
install the driver, emerge wpa_supplicant, modify a stanza in the 
wpa_supplicant.conf file to reflect my SSID and PSK, and "ifup wlan0".

Kubuntu had no options for entering a WPA-PSK key other than manually 
editing the files, and you had to trick it to make sure that it ran the 
supplicant before trying to bring the interface up.

By the way, wpa_supplicant should handle non-encrypted and WEP networks 
very nicely - if you use it you don't need to play around with 
/etc/conf.d/wireless.

-- 
Manuel A. McLure KE6TAW <manuel@mclure.org> <http://www.mclure.org>
...for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law,
no man may kill a cat.                       -- H.P. Lovecraft
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