Hello, Mandrake aims at being easy to use. There is a spot that needs improving, and it is important for laptop users.
It would be nice to unplug your laptop at work, go home, plug your laptop to the local net, and have it reconfigure itself correctly. Several programs exist that use arp requests to recognize the network, like "divine" http://www.fefe.de/divine/ or "intuitively" http://www.add.no/~tollef/intuitively/ . Some of them include a fallback to plain dhcp if the situation is unknown. This is very nice when arriving at a new place (at a customer's site, etc...). This is good. Why is none included in Mandrake ? (Because users should contribute. Right.) But read on, better can be done ! Some of us know that Kernel 2.4 has the possibility, through the "MII" feature, of detecting when you plug/unplug a network card (currently, not all card driver support it, but the most common cards on laptops do support). This is GREAT ! This opens the possibility of having the roaming scenario (home<->work<->other place), but have the reconfiguration occur automatically, without any manual (root) intervention, selection menu, etc... People target by Mandrake need this feature. It is absent. Meanwhile, Debian has laptop-net, which looks quite good. http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/omnibook/documentation/laptop-net.html http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/laptop-net.html Columbus is similar, but redhat-oriented, so should work on Mandrake. http://freshmeat.net/projects/columbus/ Mandrake has to do something. I might try this if I have time. If anyone can work this out, this would be a killer feature to have, (and a be-killed feature, not to have ;-). -- St�phane Gourichon - Labo. d'Informatique de Paris 6 - AnimatLab http://animatlab.lip6.fr/ - philo du dimanche http://amphi-gouri.org/
