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-   -   NetworkManager on Slackware 12 (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/networkmanager-on-slackware-12-a-584581/)

BCarey 09-16-2007 10:32 PM

I hope you guys who want to pursue NETWORKMANAGER don't abandon this forum, despite all the unhelpful comments you have received. Just ignore them, and don't feel you need to respond.

I have actually used NETWORKMANAGER (DLG's build) and have not found it effective, but would be very happy if it was. In order for it to be effective, it needs to be able to deal with WPA encrypted networks, and so I imagine it needs to play with wpa_supplicant. This is where it fell down for me.

Of course I have used scripts too, and for my own use don't mind putting my configs manually into wpa_supplicant.conf and running /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart (if you need to continually reedit your configs then you are not using the available tools properly), but for many reasons it would sure be nice to have a gui tool available (primarily for users I support).

So don't let a few people who ignore the intent of the thread to push you off this forum. I hope your efforts succeed.

Brian

orbit 09-16-2007 10:37 PM

Hello BCarey,

Thanks for your good words Brian, appreciated :)

I certainly intend to see this through to a successful completion.

Have a nice day

Cheers

Orbit

H_TeXMeX_H 09-17-2007 02:49 AM

If you post what errors you are getting during compilation, maybe someone here can help.

duryodhan 09-17-2007 08:29 AM

This thread could have been sooooo nice ... now it is sooo bad.. :)

Some of you are bent on discussing *why* you shouldn't use knetworkmanager!? .. if you don't want to use it then don't ... no one is forcing you to ... and it isn't as if the op is some big noob who needs to be told whats to be done and not to be done .. he has clearly stated in his first post that he doesn't want the discussion to go into that. respect his choice and shutup.

The people who are bent on making these packages aren't too far off blame too... they seem to be doing their own stuff over mail , making their own packages , not showing us the exact things they did , not telling us the problems etc.

And I think all the mods are sleeping! :)

Could the people who are making a package / slackbuild tell us what to do exactly , what they have done where they are getting stuck ... so we can test it out too or give our suggestions!

And the people who want to tell us why not to use this tool , DO NOT post here. wordpress/blogspot has a free blog , post your thoughts there and put it up on digg , NOT HERE and certainly NOT on this thread!

My 2c. :) :P

H_TeXMeX_H 09-17-2007 08:58 AM

I personally don't see a point or purpose to this tread ... it is asking for flame war.

duryodhan 09-17-2007 11:54 AM

then don't flame for god's sake ... if you don't like the topic (while others do), then voice it once and then shut up... there are many other threads

it is not an offensive topic ... why do you think about flame wars??? there is no point to them.

jong357 09-17-2007 12:01 PM

O.k.. I lied. I'm posting again. ;) Since it's already degenerated we might as well keep going with off topic discussion.

I don't see why it's asking for a flame war. The only reason it's turning into that is because those of you who don't see a need for NM on Slack are persistent on saying so. So basically because people don't know how to read, it's turned into a big debate on whether or not NM belongs on Slackware or not.

I just don't understand the mentality. No one is saying work is being done to get it included in Slackware proper. These are a few people interested in getting it to work on their own boxes and to share with the community their work. I see some really selfish and childish behavior here and it's a shame. You demean and belittle the efforts of others, intentionaly or not, because your too busy being 133t Slackware elite. That's my take on it anyway. Reminds me of people on bittorrent sites bashing on someone for posting something free. "Oh my god DUDE!! You can download this for free here.. Don't download this crap. XZY is way better..." Ya know, no one asked for opinions. But someone did ask for guidance and participation on getting NM to work on Slack.

All I was saying was that I'm not going to discuss NM development for Slack on this thread anymore. I'll continue work when time permits and I'm sure orbit or psychicist will share the results after we have or haven't ironed things out. I haven't even jumped into it yet. I spent yesterday tweaking avahi and laying the framework for it. If you are interested in getting NM to work, then just sit tight. Progress will be posted eventually, I'm sure. Rome wasn't built in a day.

I will say that I don't have very high hopes of getting NM to work properly in some situations. Work still needs to be done to the code. There is a reason why people have problems with it on Fedora, Ubuntu and Dropline. It's not because of the people who are building the source code. It's the source code itself. If it can switch between wired and an unencrypted wireless network and run without crashing then I might be satisfied with that. WPA support will come eventually, I'm sure.

If this thread was a horse, I'd take it behind a barn and shoot it...

H_TeXMeX_H 09-17-2007 04:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by duryodhan (Post 2894741)
then don't flame for god's sake ... if you don't like the topic (while others do), then voice it once and then shut up... there are many other threads

it is not an offensive topic ... why do you think about flame wars??? there is no point to them.

That's what I'm trying to do, as much as I can help myself, you know. But, I promise, I'll try not to post in this tread again.

That's true, it's not really as offensive as it is pointless. What I find disturbing is not the fact that orbit wants KNetworkManager as a part of Slackware, which is unlikely anyway (however I'm sure a separate package could be made, or maybe a slackbuild) but rather the rest of his post. The parts portraying Slackware as a distro of the past, a dinosaur that needs to be updated, revised and 'brought into the 21st century', and made to be like all the other distros, so all distros will be the same.

So there you have it, my opinion on this, so now I'll do what you say and shut up ...

psychicist 09-17-2007 06:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H (Post 2895037)
... but rather the rest of his post. The parts portraying Slackware as a distro of the past, a dinosaur that needs to be updated, revised and 'brought into the 21st century', and made to be like all the other distros, so all distros will be the same.

I understand what you're saying here. Of course with the release of Slackware 12.0 it is as up to date and stable (at the same time :)) as ever, even more so than the usual suspects/impostors (you know which these are). But we also want to give the general population some of the tools they have come to expect from other operating systems.

Also Slackware will *never* be like any other Linux distro out there. It is my opinion that if Slackware didn't exist I would be running either Solaris or a BSD flavour. They are pretty much exchangeable, that is if you understand UNIX, and I do run those other operating systems on some hardware, but I still prefer Slackware.

And to be honest if networking was so transparent in some not too distant future that the tools themselves could automatically reconfigure the interfaces to use another wired or wireless network (IPv6?) I would gladly get rid of the Networkmanager again. But for the time being it seems to be the best solution for at least normal users.

evilDagmar 09-19-2007 04:24 AM

Well, to put it bluntly, NetworkManager works just fine in Dropline, in both the last 2.16.x iteration as well as the 2.18 beta, and I have every expectation it will continue working for the 2.20 release.

As far as I know the 2.16.x release should have worked with WPA networks. Being that I had exactly zero people reporting anything other than "it works here" if it wasn't working for someone, they have only themselves to blame. Note that for WPA support to work with NetworkManager, the user's wireless card must be one that currently operates normally with WPA support--this is not something that can be assumed, as WPA mode requires support from the wireless driver itself, and there's a few chipsets that currently have serious issues in this respect.

You will find it very difficult to get NetworkManager to work with Slackware without packages being "teh intrusiv!" so I can't wait to see certain factions quickly begin eating their words on that front. In short, you have to "break" something to make it possible for NetworkManager to function correctly.

psychicist 09-19-2007 04:02 PM

Both jong357 and I don't want to mess too much with the default package selection included with Slackware. Wholesale replacement of packages included with the distribution is simply not an option because of the huge amount of testing it has seen in "current".

Is it really necessary to break something to get Networkmanager to work? As far as I know none of the packages required to get it to run is included with Slackware itself, so how could it ever be intrusive? Please clarify what you mean because I don't really understand.

If you mean you have to replace some GTK/GNOME packages because newer versions are included with various GNOME releases I agree, but that's only because you want consistency within a GNOME build. I have also built GNOME packages (for the first time) but I'd never tolerate any intrusiveness because KDE, XFCE and others have to keep running with or without GNOME.

evilDagmar 10-03-2007 03:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by psychicist (Post 2897187)
Both jong357 and I don't want to mess too much with the default package selection included with Slackware. Wholesale replacement of packages included with the distribution is simply not an option because of the huge amount of testing it has seen in "current".

What does Slackware-current have to do with any of this? Slackware-current is vivified when there's things which might be incompatible that PV needs to test. It's never to my knowledge had any promise or guarantee of compatibility with the release trees. Gratuitously replacing everything on a -release based system with everything from -current is dumb, and refusing to upgrade packages on a -release based system out of dogma is just as dumb, and for the same reason: In both cases, things are being changed without paying any heed to what packages are actually meant to work with one another.

Quote:

Originally Posted by psychicist (Post 2897187)
Is it really necessary to break something to get Networkmanager to work? As far as I know none of the packages required to get it to run is included with Slackware itself, so how could it ever be intrusive? Please clarify what you mean because I don't really understand.

I'm going to leave this as a surprise to you then when you try to get it working, but I'll give you a hint... It relies on dhcp-3.0.5-i486-2 which is something you should have already been aware of.

Quote:

Originally Posted by psychicist (Post 2897187)
If you mean you have to replace some GTK/GNOME packages because newer versions are included with various GNOME releases I agree, but that's only because you want consistency within a GNOME build. I have also built GNOME packages (for the first time) but I'd never tolerate any intrusiveness because KDE, XFCE and others have to keep running with or without GNOME.

Yep, well, in testing so far, 2.20 has upgraded a lot of stuff which has resulted in zero breakage--with the exception of exposing a bug in XFCE. At some point Patrick is going to need to actually update XFCE and this will probably go away then, but until then, it's XFCE's fault, not gtk+'s.

jong357 10-03-2007 07:24 PM

I'm done with my gnome-2.20.0 build now so I suppose I'll jump on NM when time permits. What's news with everyone else? Have you got it running?

psychicist 10-04-2007 04:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilDagmar (Post 2911517)
What does Slackware-current have to do with any of this? Slackware-current is vivified when there's things which might be incompatible that PV needs to test. It's never to my knowledge had any promise or guarantee of compatibility with the release trees.

What more is a release than a stable snapshot in time of what's in current at the moment of release? As such the packages have been tested together and are relied upon not to be buggy, when they're working together.

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilDagmar (Post 2911517)
Gratuitously replacing everything on a -release based system with everything from -current is dumb, and refusing to upgrade packages on a -release based system out of dogma is just as dumb, and for the same reason: In both cases, things are being changed without paying any heed to what packages are actually meant to work with one another.

Dropline GNOME has been accused of being too intrusive and replacing packages when there is no need to. Also from the point of view of offering an all in one installer you include all kinds of third party dependencies. I agree that's simpler for an end user, but harder to maintain when you have hundreds of other packages. That's why I don't favour your approach.

I am of the opinion (and I thing jong357 too) that all these dependencies should be in the operating system itself or a separate repository from the one in which GNOME packages reside. I previously installed Freerock GNOME, but since it isn't updated and I'm now building on x86, MIPS and SPARC I'm doing it the right way.

That does not mean that my GNOME packages are perfect or even correct, but at least they don't mess with the system. Also I am in no way a luddite or something so if I have to patch some package (such as dhcp) and it works without introducing any bugs I will do so. Still I would like to keep this kind of upgrades to a minimum.

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilDagmar (Post 2911517)
Yep, well, in testing so far, 2.20 has upgraded a lot of stuff which has resulted in zero breakage--with the exception of exposing a bug in XFCE. At some point Patrick is going to need to actually update XFCE and this will probably go away then, but until then, it's XFCE's fault, not gtk+'s.

Well, this approach doesn't work for me. Since I'm the developer of an x86, MIPS and SPARC (and PPC, Itanium ...) distribution, if there is such breakage I will have to make a choice to either not upgrade gtk+ or patch/upgrade XFCE to maintain consistency and correctness. Something in between is not an option for me nor the end user.

psychicist 10-04-2007 04:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jong357 (Post 2912406)
I'm done with my gnome-2.20.0 build now so I suppose I'll jump on NM when time permits. What's news with everyone else? Have you got it running?

I haven't had much time to take a look at it, since university labs and building SPARC packages have taken too much of it. I have also taken an approach to only build 2.x.3 GNOME releases since it would take too much time to build every release for each architecture.

If you can get it to work, please report back. I am mainly a KDE user so I'm eager to get KNetworkmanager working, although a working Networkmanager is very welcome indeed. I will try on my laptop over the weekend.


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