[PLUG] Jaunty-licious

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 8 May 2009 07:11:29 -0700
drew wymore <drew.wymore at gmail.com> dijo:

> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 6:21 AM, drew wymore <drew.wymore at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I decided to take the leap and install JJ and I like it so far. However I
> > have run in to 2 issues. I can't seem to get my wireless card to associate
> > with my access point, something that hasn't been an issue with this laptop
> > when using Fedora or Slackware. I also can't seem to enable desktop effects,
> > Slackware doesn't offer this out of the box but with Fedora I had no issues.
> >
> > I'm off to research.
> >
> Installed a couple of packages and enabled the proper plugins and compiz
> works wonderfully, my need for eye candy satisfied now I just have to figure
> out the wifi issue.

I downloaded the alphas of Jaunty as it neared release. At the last
Clinic I booted to the release candidate live CD. I was very pleased to
see the notification area wireless icon in the Gnome panel. Even more
pleasing was clicking on it and seeing Free Geek and a couple other
wireless networks. And it was especially pleasing to be able to just
click on Free Geek and get an IP address almost instantly. 

My laptop has the Intel 4965agn wireless. I have never had any problems
getting distros (live or otherwise) to see it. Getting it to connect
and stay connected is another matter. In the past Network Manager
sucked rocks. For example, at PSU there are always at least a dozen
networks available, although as a student I can connect only to General
Access. Nevertheless, they should all appear. They do appear if I scan
from the command line, so I know the device and its drivers are
working. But the drop-down in the Network Manager GUI rarely displayed
any available networks. Sometimes if you clicked it several dozen times
eventually it would display a few networks, and then the display would
suddenly disappear before you could click on one of them. The maddening
part was that this was the behavior for years with no improvement.

As a result of all this a long time ago I discovered and installed
wicd. Wicd will not share its ball with other players, so installing
wicd uninstalls Network Manager. My feeling was good riddance. Wicd
always worked great. I put a little launcher icon in the Gnome panel
and when I clicked on it I could instantly see all the networks
available, even my ethernet at home.

But I was very impressed with how well the live CD of the Jaunty
release candidate worked with wireless. So before upgrading to Jaunty I
reinstalled Network Manager and removed wicd. I was hoping that the new
version would work for me as well as it did on the release candidate.

Unfortunately, although I have connected via wireless only twice since
the dist-upgrade, Network Manager is not working as well as it does
with the live CD. At the general meeting last night it took me several
minutes of poking to get connected. The Gnome panel icon is supposed to
display two monitors when connected to ethernet, as I am at home, and
it does so. It is supposed to change to the bars icon when you are not
connected to ethernet, and then clicking on it is supposed to display
available wireless networks. Last night it stubbornly remained the
two-monitor icon and refused to display any available wireless networks.

Clearly there is something in my installation that is goobering up
Network Manager and making it not work the way it does with the live CD
of Jaunty. Sadly, I am not smart enough to figure out what it is.
However, I *am* smart enough to know how to install wicd. As a side
benefit, once I reinstall wicd I can get rid of that annoying
notification area in the Gnome panel.