Package: gnome-system-tools Version: 1.4.1-2 Severity: normal i was at a hotel this past week seeking to use my debian box to connect to the free, as in you paid for our hotel and you may use our internet access upon agreeing to a click-through agreement, wireless access. they told me that i could not use my internal wireless card, and needed to plug in their card via cat 5 to the wired ethernet port. they also handed me a pamphlet that basically said set your ssid to "hotel-ssid".
anyway, i wanted to see how "easy" it would be to get connected with tools available to me on my supermodern gnome desktop. so, i go into network-admin and look at the properties for eth0. well, since eth0 is a wired interface, there is no option to enter the ssid. so network-admin was no help for me, the naive user, in this situation. because network-admin failed me, i manually edited /etc/network/interfaces and got things going that way -- no big deal for the technically apt, but far beyond the means of an average end-user. once i got the wireless connection up and running, i decided that i would see if i could use network admin to store this as a location (in case i ever come back). so i set this as a hotel configuration, and set up my home configuration as another location. well, since my home configuration was invalid at this location, the "changing profile" operation took an extremely long time (like 3 minutes). why should the user have to wait this long? can't it work behind the scenes? can't it detect that the network is not available quicker? i noticed that changing location actually modifies my /etc/network/interfaces. where are my non-active locations saved at? and why can't the locations all be stored in /etc/network/interfaces via interface naming schemes? i think this would be less prone to error. the moral of the story is that network-admin should be flexible enough to allow the user to treat any interface as wireless if he/she chooses. also, network-admin shouldn't waste so much time switching between network locations, and if it has to, it should be behind the scenes. and finally, it should be clearer what network-admin is doing in terms of locations (where are other location settings saved at?). thank you for your consideration and hard work. mike -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable APT prefers testing APT policy: (600, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-686 Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Versions of packages gnome-system-tools depends on: ii gconf2 2.14.0-1 GNOME configuration database syste ii libart-2.0-2 2.3.17-1 Library of functions for 2D graphi ii libatk1.0-0 1.11.3-1 The ATK accessibility toolkit ii libbonobo2-0 2.14.0-1 Bonobo CORBA interfaces library ii libbonoboui2-0 2.10.1-2 The Bonobo UI library ii libc6 2.3.6-3 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libcairo2 1.0.2-3 The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra ii libfontconfig1 2.3.2-1.1 generic font configuration library ii libgconf2-4 2.14.0-1 GNOME configuration database syste ii libglade2-0 1:2.5.1-2 library to load .glade files at ru ii libglib2.0-0 2.10.1-2 The GLib library of C routines ii libgnome-keyring0 0.4.9-1 GNOME keyring services library ii libgnome2-0 2.12.0.1-5 The GNOME 2 library - runtime file ii libgnomecanvas2-0 2.14.0-1 A powerful object-oriented display ii libgnomeui-0 2.12.1-1 The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf ii libgnomevfs2-0 2.12.2-5 GNOME virtual file-system (runtime ii libgtk2.0-0 2.8.16-1 The GTK+ graphical user interface ii libice6 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 Inter-Client Exchange library ii libnautilus-extension1 2.12.2-2 libraries for nautilus components ii liborbit2 1:2.14.0-1 libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB ii libpango1.0-0 1.12.0-2 Layout and rendering of internatio ii libpopt0 1.7-5 lib for parsing cmdline parameters ii libsm6 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System Session Management ii libx11-6 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System protocol client li ii libxcursor1 1.1.3-1 X cursor management library ii libxext6 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System miscellaneous exte ii libxi6 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System Input extension li ii libxinerama1 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System multi-head display ii libxml2 2.6.23.dfsg.2-3 GNOME XML library ii libxrandr2 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6 X Window System Resize, Rotate and ii libxrender1 1:0.9.0.2-1 X Rendering Extension client libra ii perl 5.8.8-3 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction ii system-tools-backends 1.4.2-1 System Tools to manage computer co ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3-11 compression library - runtime Versions of packages gnome-system-tools recommends: ii gksu 1.3.6-1 graphical frontend to su ii gnome-control-center 1:2.12.3-2 utilities to configure the GNOME d -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
