I don't know enough about this to offer a value judgment, so I'm just
going to document what I did....
My network driver isn't in the Wizard list (it's orinoco_cs). So, to
get my laptop on the network, I copied the ifcfg-eth0 from my 8.2
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts to the same 9.0 directory. This appeared
to work in that it brought up the eth0 interface OK, and I could reach
my wireless hub, but no route add default had been done.
I compared 8.2 and 9.0 files until I finally detected that
drakconnect_conf had a "Internet Access" setting that, in 9.0, wasn't
set to anything. In 8.2, it was set to "lan", and there were also line
items for Internet Gateway. So I set these manually in 9.0, did an
ifdown eth0 / ifup eth0, and still no default routing.
So I fired up MCC and chose Network/Connection. I had done this several
times before, but could never get past the driver selection process.
This time, as a result of my manual fiddling, the Internet Access
section showed lan rather than modem (I had previously thought that that
middle section was devoted to modem access), and after Testing showed
Unconnected while the lan eth0 interface showed "up" on orinoco_cs.
I clicked "Connect" in the middle section, and got the Wizard again.
This time I got to the driver selection panel, and said to myself,
"hell, let's go through the rabbit hole ("Alice in
Wonderland" reference)", and clicked Next, letting it believe I wanted a
3c905 (or whatever is first). It went through failing to load it, and
asked me if I wanted to try again. I said No.
Wonder of wonders, I am now presented with a panel that acknowledges the
orinoco_cs driver, and leads me through being able to specify a gateway
(the data I had placed manually in drakconnect_conf didn't show up).
The wizard completes, I re-click on Connect in the middle section, and I
get a nice Network Monitoring window. I open a command window and type
"route", and lo and behold I now have a default routing.
Seriously, I understand your desire to hide detail from Joe and Joan
Soap, but you have to realize that a very large percentage of the
sysadmins doing new Mandrake installs are going to be more or less in my
category. I've been working with Linux for about 10 years, although I'm
not a guru. I've only been working with Mandrake for 1-2 years. I sort
of know how things work, but I am abysmally ignorant of where you guys
have hidden things in all of the myriad startup and shutdown scripts.
Then, there are going to be the guys who are familiar with Unix but not
Linux. All of us are going to be tearing our hair out trying to patch
installs with as-yet-unsupported hardware or script bugs.
No instinct I have ever acquired in my professional life would have led
me to deliberately give a wrong driver specification to a Wizard in
order to get through to the part of the wizard that would believe what
was in the control files and let me go from there. This was just sheer
dumb luck. There has to be a better way.
Suggestions:
(1) If you have internal docs on your scripts and architecture, PLEASE
make them public. If they already are, please advertise them.
(2) Make a central .conf file in the root directory, or someplace where
we just can't miss it, that will allow us to cause the scripts to dump
VOLUMES of messages into syslog (or wherever) so that those of us having
problems can trace what is actually going on during failures.
Thanks,
Frank
