Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

NewsForge looks at Netapplet. "After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell's SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it's nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution."

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Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 0:35 UTC (Tue) by bradfitz (subscriber, #4378) [Link] (1 responses)

I thought NetworkManager was what all the cool kids were using these days. Isn't that "The Future"?

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 0:41 UTC (Tue) by newren (guest, #5160) [Link]

Yes

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 2:02 UTC (Tue) by gutschke (subscriber, #27910) [Link] (1 responses)

I have been using WiFi-Radar for a little while. It addresses the same need, and works quite well for me. I'd be curious to hear about a comparision of feature sets.

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 10:06 UTC (Tue) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Hmmm, WiFi radar seems to be an application; NetApplet is an applet,
that's probably one of the differences... =)

SUSE and Gnome vs KDE

Posted Sep 20, 2005 8:18 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (4 responses)

Btw: What is the latest situation with SUSE and Gnome vs KDE? This article indicates that a SUSE-only tool developed by Novell engineers, was done on GTK. Traditionally (yast) it would have been done on kde. I guess they still are doing tools on KDE as well, so is the policy now that engineers are free to use whatever toolkit they want? Which is also not a good policy imho.

SUSE and Gnome vs KDE

Posted Sep 20, 2005 10:30 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (3 responses)

It is a system tray icon so works equally well on Gnome and KDE, and given coordinated themes should look good on both desktops. Without specs like this, they probably would have had to implement the applet twice ...

While SUSE has traditionally been focused on KDE, Novell has an interest in Gnome too: it bought Ximian, and the Novell Linux Desktop product is Gnome based.

SUSE and Gnome vs KDE

Posted Sep 20, 2005 15:03 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, I understand all this. What I meant is, if they wanted to be consistent, they would have made the system tray applet based on KDE libraries, and as you say, it would have worked equally well on both desktops. It's just unusual to not focus on one technology. Maintenance, support, documentation, training of new developers etcetc just becomes more complex.

I realise Novell bought Ximian, but that could have been for many other reasons as well (Mono). That's why I asked if anyone knows whether this could be seen as a sign or just something weird.

And btw, while in theory you are right, as a Mandriva user I can attest that it doesn't look pretty in practice. (Mandriva has KDE as default, but their own apps are GTK.) Gnome apps in KDE are not a pretty sight, although not a total mess either, but: Cancel/Ok buttons wrong way, dialogs pop out in places you almost won't see them, plus dialogs are in independent windows. All of this and some other stuff can safely be considered weird behavior, if you are using KDE with mostly KDE apps. (And by this I'm not saying there is something wrong with Gnome, just that Gnome apps inside KDE don't look like KDE apps and I don't understand why a distribution would want to produce such situations other than out of ignorance or incompetence or laziness.)

SUSE and Gnome vs KDE

Posted Sep 21, 2005 3:06 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

> Cancel/Ok buttons wrong way

this can actually be corrected with a gconf setting in newer version of
gtk+

SUSE and Gnome vs KDE

Posted Sep 21, 2005 3:05 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

> the Novell Linux Desktop product is Gnome based

you mean the "enterprise desktop" distro that comes with both GNOME and
KDE and makes you pick which one you want at install? hard to say that it
is based on GNOME when that's the case .. ;)

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 12:54 UTC (Tue) by jwboyer (guest, #23296) [Link] (1 responses)

Hm, interesting. I know Robert was working with NetworkManager a while ago (see his blog). I wonder if this is a rewrite of that, or if it's just based off of it.

Would be a shame if his enhancements didn't make it back to the product he was working with.

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 21, 2005 5:49 UTC (Wed) by pgb (guest, #30022) [Link]

It's more like Netapplet was Novell/Ximian's totally throwaway hack for an immediate need to provide something, while NetworkManager is a concise plan for dealing with networking on mobile computers in a sane way. Luckily, while NetworkManager originated at Red Hat, the Novell guys agree with this assessment and are now working on NetworkManager, so no work is wasted.

Basically, this article is a bit late: while Netapplet was a useful hack, it's quickly becoming obsolete.

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 20, 2005 13:02 UTC (Tue) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link]

My experience has been that wireless support is still not great in linux so gui's seem premature. cli commands ifconfig, iwconfig and dhclient (or another dhcp client) plus some knowledge of /etc/network/interfaces (Debian and derivatives) gets me by.....

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 21, 2005 0:36 UTC (Wed) by mightyduck (guest, #23760) [Link]

I wonder what's the big deal with this. I use ifplugd in order to start
or stop my wired interface if I plug the cable in and kinternet for the
rest. At one point I tripped over this netapplet thingie by accident and
it not only looked ugly on my desktop but I still believe it was
responsible for wiping out changes I made to
my /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-* files but I have no real proof for
that. I got rid of it as fast as I could.

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 1, 2006 22:24 UTC (Sun) by opeter (guest, #34880) [Link]

I think that exist another good applications for standard 802.11 a/b/g for linux but unnafortunatelly its few the contribution from users

im finding now Barcode Scanners with WIFI added and that have good support in Linux box. Peter

Wireless made easy with Netapplet (NewsForge)

Posted Jan 1, 2006 22:30 UTC (Sun) by opeter (guest, #34880) [Link]

system tray