Hi,

I've just installed Slackware64 14.1 on an HP Pavilion DM1 laptop, in replacement of Elementary OS 0.2 (which worked quite well on this hardware).

I opted for KDE, which has become my preferred desktop environment. Unfortunately KDE's native 'networkmanagement' applet doesn't seem to play well. It keeps losing the connection every 5 to 10 minutes. I also attempted Wicd, which seems to have the same problem. I decided to uninstall the 'networkmanagement' package, and I decided to run the 'network-manager-applet' within KDE. I remember RHEL/CentOS 6.x use GNOME's nm-applet within a KDE session, and this works well.

I followed this little Fedora-specific mini-HOWTO, which worked:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KDE/Us...networkmanager

After restarting KDE, nm-applet appears correctly in the system tray. I can connect to my wireless network, and this time, the connection also seems stable. But another problem appears on the horizon: NetworkManager doesn't remember passwords anymore and keeps asking me for the wireless key on each new connection.

The only information I found about this is in the Arch wiki, but it's PAM-specific:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=82774

And also here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...ng_after_login

I keep telling myself this should be doable, since nm-applet works perfectly from within an Xfce session.

Any suggestions?

Did you install the packages required for secure credential storage for the Gnome Network Manager Applet? I.e. gnone-keyring?

NB: if both networkmanagement and wicd keep dropping your wireless connection every 15 minutes, would the conclusion not be that this may not be an issue with the networkmanager or wicd or their applets at all?

Eric

Yes, gnome-keyring is installed.

As for networkmanagement and wicd, I can't really say. But here's what I know: nm-applet does keep a stable connection, while networkmanagement and wicd do not.

I'm investigating this further now. I'm currently setting up a double boot on this laptop with Xfce on one side and KDE on the other. It's a bit of a hassle, and this is one of those rare moments where I have secret fantasies of throwing all my penguin-related stuff out of the window and migrate to Mac OS X on my laptop and FreeBSD on my server. This lasts about 30 seconds, and then I'm back at the task at hand. This is a problem I've been wanting to solve for quite a long time.

Odd. I've not experienced any problems using NetworkManager, other than the confusing GUI interface.

I used nm-applet to set up my connection (back in January this year) and haven't had to do anything else since.

It looks like this laptop has Atheros AR9285 wifi. A quick googling showed that passing a nohwcrypt=1 to the module makes it work reliably.

I am skeptical that the applet itself causes the problem.

May be upgrading wpa_supplicant could help too. It is really outdated in Slackware.

Cheers

OK, I found the solution after a few more hours of fiddling.

First of all, the laptop has a Broadcom wireless card which has to be used with the broadcom-sta driver to work correctly.

For my experiment, I setup a double boot, with Slackware64 14.1 + Xfce on one side, and Slackware64 14.1 + KDE on the other side.

Let me clarify that there are two different graphic frontends for NetworkManager:

1. 'network-manager-applet', which is used in a default Xfce setup
2. KDE's 'networkmanagement' Plasma applet

On the Xfce side, things run perfectly out of the box. As soon as I get rid of any configuration in rc.inet1.conf and activate rc.networkmanager, the corresponding applet shows up in the system tray. I can connect to my wireless network, the connection is stable, and it also connects automagically to it after subsequent reboots.

On the KDE side, I can use the corresponding 'networkmanagement' Plasma widget to connect to my wireless, but it fails in several aspects. The connection is not stable and I simply lose my IP address (with the applet showing I'm still connected). After a KDE restart, the applet insists on asking for a password for a reconnection, and I must check "System-wide connection" to prevent that sort of behaviour. So I decided to give the other applet a spin in KDE. Here's how it works.

Remove KDE's applet:

For nm-applet to show up automagically in KDE, do this:

This is a partial success, as nm-applet now shows up correctly in KDE's system tray, but... you can't connect to anything except an unencrypted wireless signal. Neither can you configure anything, as the applet's "Store" button is grayed out.

A quick look on the Xfce side shows us the following process under the hood:

This process is absent on the KDE side, so we have to invoke it manually. We can do it in the same manner as we did it for the applet:

Restart KDE, and everything works perfectly. I can connect to an encrypted network, the connection is stable, and my laptop automagically reconnects to it after a reboot. Plus, the applet makes use of the Oxygen-GTK theme, so visual integration is perfect.

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FYI - I'm doing the same thing (running nm-applet under kde) on Linux Mint at work. I followed these basic steps, and now I can connect to wireless networks. I couldn't get nm-applet to ask for my password every time (I didn't want it storing the password), but then I installed gnome-keyring as Alien Bob suggested, and now that works as well. Thanks for the information in this thread.