I have just started experimenting with incognito. I have run into a problem in that I cannot connect to my wireless Internet feed, wondering if anyone here can help me?

firstly, with the ethernet cable in, I get Internet no problems. It is wireless Internet I cannot manage. I can get wireless Internet on my other laptop running XP. So there is no problem with the router or Internet provider.

ok so I take out the ethernet cable.

I right click on the network icon in the system tray and it displays the wireless network I wish to connect to. I select this item and a new window opens asking for a pass phrase. I put in the correct pass phrase - but it keeps saying ' the connection could not be established. Please verify your settings and try again'

There are a couple of options in the form of pulldown menus. The first lets me choose between WEP pass phrase, WEP40/104 bit hex, WEP40/104 bit ascii and the second lets me choose between open system and shared key.

I'm pretty sure it is a WPA encrypted network, not the WEP. But there is no opportunity to select WPA. what are these different options, and why do they not include WPA?

There is a further thing that confuses me - if I choose to manually connect to a wireless network, and enable the checkbox for using encryption, the same two pulldown menus appear only the first one has an additional two items for WPA personal and WPA enterprise. I don't understand why the WPA options are not available in the first instance.

thanks for any light you can throw on this... sorry I feel it is the basic question and if I had some understanding of wireless networking or even networking in general or even anything then the answer would be obvious. I constantly feel like a total idiot because I don't have a clue how to sort out Internet on computers. I can code in C++ but this I cannot handle. I hate it.

For each network in the list that have been scanned (what you call "the first instance") the network manager tries to autodetect which encryption protocols are used and won't give you the option to change. If that fails, try the manual approach while selecting WPA personal (if that indeed is the protocol used) and see if that works.

It would be good, though, if you could check what type of encryption the network uses by some other means. I'm not very familiar with Windows, but I'd be surprised if it can't report such trivial information.

Hey, take it easy! To me it seems like you've hit a bug. For various reasons the version of NetworkManager in Incognito is pretty outdated, so this isn't surprising really.

BTW, which Incognito release are you using?

Yep, looks like a bug
As you say, I determine it's a WPA Personal (PSK in Linux, guess tahts the same) using TKIP
I try to create a conxn manually
I put in the ESSID ('NETGEAR') & all the right data above
Still it fails, bringing me back to the old (first instance) box

Is there any direction for doing this off the command line?

Thanks

sy

Perhaps not a bug. Check that you have wpa_supplicant or some equivalent service running on you laptop. If you're using WPA encryption, you need something running that implements the WPA protocols.

Sure, but it's pretty awkward. First stop the service that usually handles the network and create a wpa_supplicant configuration file:
Next, start wpa_supplicant (stop it by pressing Ctrl+C):
In the above you might need to change eth0 to something else. To see a list of available wireless interfaces you can use:
Similarly, the driver (wext) might need to be changed to some of the following: hostap, hermes, madwifi, atmel, wext, ndiswrapper, broadcom, ipw, wired, bsd, ndis

If wpa_supplicant seems to work (look on the its output in the terminal) you can use the following tool for scanning and connecting to WPA networks:
Again, it would be good if you could report which version of Incognito you are using.

thank you so much for taking the trouble to explain this.

I have actually found a solution in the form of buying a netbook, sticking the dongle into it and rebooting.

I am flabbergasted. Yes finally a genuine opportunity to use this excellent word An operating system that is truly portable - I had no idea this is possible. I thought every operating system had a look through the hardware and configured itself for that particular hardware configuration. I guess live CDs have been doing this for a while. but this is too neat!!!

Anyway, wireless Internet works flawlessly off this new machine. I bought a random WiFi card for my old ThinkPad, and it always gave problems - even in XP it needed a lot of tweaking. So it is hardly any surprise incognito did not handle it correctly. I was just getting stuck because no error was reported; it was just behaving wrong.

I am very happy now - incognito appears to be a very beautiful little distribution; a labour of love. I don't think I'm ever going to change now.

I have lots of questions, like for example is it possible for it to scramble itself after five minutes and require a password in order to restore the desktop? would it be possible to scramble it by pressing the escape key? ( I think that would be a really cool feature...)

Anyway before I pester, I will go and read the documentation.

love you all
x
sly

ps any plans of having an IRC channel on freenode?

Yes, you can lock the screen through K-menu -> Lock Session. The problem with passwords in Incognito is that they will have to be re-set every time you boot up, whick can be done through Control Center -> Security & Privacy -> Password... -> Change Password. The default password for the incognito user is empty (i.e. type nothing).

However, don't expect this lock to provide any strong protection. It may be enough to keep nosy people away, but likely not the authorities if they come to seize your equipment.

This can be done by pressing Ctrl+Alt+L as of stanard KDE behaviour. The ESC key is used for various things in many applications, so I don't think it's a very good choice. If you want to change it it can be done through Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts

Not at this moment, but you can find me (anonym) on #tor and #nottor on irc.oftc.net. However, I prefer to provide help using this forum so that other people can benefit from the discussion.