WLAN Roaming Configuration
 

Hi everyone,

thanks to good documentation and tutorials like Alien Bob's excellent step-by-step WLAN configuration instructions it is easy to set up WLAN in recent Slackware versions (thanks a lot, Eric!).

However, I'd like to go one step further now, with my laptop. As I'll be travelling more often in the foreseeable future, I'd like to be able to connect to WLAN hot spots in hotels, railway stations and air ports with a minimum of hassle.

What's the best way to go about it?

Of course, Wicd is quite useful, but I'd prefer a KDE application, and I'd like to be able to define "profiles" for various scenarios.

Certainly I am not the first Slackware user with this requiremnent, and probably there are tons or docs regarding this topic. However, searching LQ and the internet I haven't found what I am looking for.

I am looking forward to all your answers and suggestions, thanks in advance!

gargamel

There is NetworkManager on slackbuilds.org.
I just use wicd.

I have used wpa_gui for as long as I can remember.
All you need is wpa_supplicant running.
Just remember to have update_config=1 on your /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf, so you can save new networks you might add with wpa_gui.

Thanks, I'll try them both (wpa_gui and NetworkManager), although wpa_gui is English only and NetworkManager is Gnome (the applet, at least). As it seems there's not KDE equivalent for Wicd...
I also found Wifi-Radar (maybe misspelled here), which seems to support profiles.

gargamel

Thanks everyone, for the moment I'll stick with wpa-gui, although it is "only" Qt, but not really KDE, and English-only, and gets easily confused, if the user is not careful.

I started wpa_gui from the KDE start menu, configured my network connection, then closed the wpa_gui window by clicking on the X in the top-right corner. Now I started wpa_gui from a konsole window. Disappointment: This time wpa_gui came up with an error message that it was unable to get the status from wpa_supplicant. Each time I tried it, another wpa_gui window was opened and closed, and all the processes were sent to the background, instead of killing them.

Not even ending the KDE session helped. I had to go back to runlevel 1 and then to 4 again, in order to get wpa_gui working as expected, again.

As I said, currently it works and does what I want, but I'll certainly checkout NetworkManager, too, in due course. However, for now the topic is SOLVED.

Thanks again!

gargamel