[lug] Choosing among possible wireless essids

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 04:36:23PM -0700, Todd Ruskell wrote:

> I'm using the network-admin which shipped with xubuntu 6.06.  In 
> Debian-land, it appears to be in the gnome-system-tools package.  It's 
> pretty decent, and when you select the wireless interface it gives you a 
> nice drop-down list of visible AP essids.
> 
> If you want to stay strictly with kde, have you tried the separate 
> KWiFimanager application?  I've just played with it a little, and it at 
> least appears to scan for available APs.  In my 5 minutes of playing 
> it's not clear how to activate what it sees, but seems it should be 
> possible.  It looks like the network configuration utility is a subset 
> of what KWiFimanager provides.
> 
> Even though I'm generally a kde person, I've been pretty happy with 
> network-admin, and since that's what got installed by default, that's 
> what I'm using.

Thanks!  They should integrate that into the KDE network configuration
utility for simplicity (or at least have a button to fire it up or suggest it
if it isn't installed).

I think iwlist works on Etch too.  A lot of things have improved since Sarge
was released...  almost all my hardware worked right away and they finally
moved wireless network config back to /etc/network (what an ugly hack it was
to put that stuff in /etc/pcmcia).  I got ALSA working on my Thinkpad 600Es
for the first time ever.  Man what an improvement: no more sound hangs from
those buggy old OSS drivers, jack and the other sound utils should work now,
no more fragile sound system!  USB and PCMCIA networking even worked out of
the box for the first time ever on these machines.  

My ancient Thinkpads will live on!

And on top of all that, despite the normal trend of each new revision of
software being slower and requiring more resources than the last, these old
computers seem to run faster on Etch than they did on Sarge.  Yippee!