On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 03:13 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="James Gregory"> > > > So these days I'm on Ubuntu and there's this network manager thing which > > can see that /etc/network/interfaces has both wired and unwired networks, > > and it works out which I'm using and configures things appropriately. > > Which is very nice. > > > > But what I want is a fusion of these two technologies. Is there a way I > > can setup Ubuntu to automatically use a wired network if it's available, > > and if not do this search for available wireless networks, setting the > > appropriate key if one is found? > > That's exactly what NetworkManager does. :-) Plug in wired and you're on, > unplug, and it'll use your preferred wifi network (ie. one that you've > chosen before). Is it not doing this for you? Perhaps you're not actually > using NetworkManager, but the installed-by-default network configuration > tools? If so, I strongly recommend NM, depending on which kind of wireless > hardware you have (the Atheros drivers suck for scanning, so they make NM > entirely pointless, though a very recent version works around some of that > breakage, to the detriment of some niceness).
Ok, so it turns out I was only kinda using it. I'd added nm-applet, so when I was plugging it in I was getting the little twirly thing that said it was doing DHCP, but if I clicked on its icon it told me there were no networks. So I read the documentation and discovered that I need to remove the contents of my /etc/network/interfaces file for all the interfaces I want it to manage. If I do that, it scans for APs and gives me a list of them that I can configure by clicking on them. I don't yet know if it can automatically pick one of these APs and set the key correspondingly, or if I'll need to click on the icon and choose one each time. I suppose I'll find out when it becomes an issue. But yes, that was most of the problem. Thanks for your help. It's pretty nifty once you get past that hurdle :) James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
