UPDATE: I’ve gone off the idea. I don’t roam, I don’t want all the family to have to know the WPA passphrase to use their laptop account, and I like wmii , where applets don’t really make any sense. I prefer the system-wide way of doing WPA myself.
Here’s the Ubuntu Dapper (or better) ‘WPA Howto’:
$ sudo apt-get install network-manager wpasupplicant
$ # edit out the NICs in /etc/network/interfaces
$ # that you want to be managed by NM
$ sudo reboot
$ # after reboot, run up 'nm-applet'NetworkManager is great. The daemon runs in the background, watching for HAL events, and uses the best connection it can.
Plug in ethernet, it uses ethernet. Yank it out, it scans for WLANs.
If it needs help (e.g. unlocking the WPA-PSK or WEP keys stored in your keyring) it asks the user via a GNOME or KDE applet2. It uses a local DNS forwarder and can notify apps (over DBUS) of network state changes.
This setup has a few implications. The most obvious is that you don’t get online until after you login to the GUI.
It also assumes the user is the one with the knowledge, not (whoever is root on) the laptop (suppose that’s how other OSes handle it anyway, just feels odd).
I imagine if you run many non-DBUSed servers that need a network at boot, or have hardcoded IPs in your firewall, it might piss you off a bit. But would you roam with that setup?
Although the applet is by default the font of all knowledge, you could easily run a non-GUI userland component as part of the usual boot If ubuntu-installer had one, WPA wireless users could net install at last.
1 seems 256Mb isn’t enough RAM (!) to hibernate. Shut down firefox first and it’s fine.
2 the applet works in fluxbox (and other window managers I presume) too, but it’ll ask you for the passphrase every boot. You can Google up some gnome-keyring voodoo if that drives you mad.