How do I add my access point in Knetworkmanager?

I am running Kubuntu 8.04 x64 version. My wireless card and my Wifi network are working great with my machine out of the box(i.e. no tweaking needed). My only issue is in the way I am hooking up to the network. I am using Knetworkmanager and it sees all the neighboring networks but it doesn't list mine, I guess because it doesn't broadcast the ESSID. Therefore right now every time I want to connect to my network I have to type in all the info each time and click connect. Is there a way to save this info as a profile or something so that I can click on my network and have it connect. I don't want to keep having to type all this info in each time. Thanks.

 

Sorry, I don't use KDE, but when you use the 'Connect to Other Wireless Network' function, doesn't the network then show up in the trusted network list? It looks like it should, based on this page:

http://en.opensuse.org/KNetworkManager

Maybe you need to manually adjust the list? I'm not sure if that's even possible...

 

Thanks for the link. I will check it out. No, my network does not show up in the list of networks. I am not broadcasting my ESSID. It picks up many other neighboring networks around me, ,but not mine. And that is exactly what I am looking to do, manually adjusting the list to add my network, but I can't figure how to do this.

You would think there would be a simple "Add a network" option that allows me to save my network config with a name.

 

I'm not sure if it's the same as Networkmanager's editor program under Gnome, but on my system the network list editor is a separate program called nm-editor. It's in the Gnome menus under System -> Preferences. Maybe it's there for you in a similar menu, or you have /usr/bin/nm-editor installed but not as a menu choice.

BTW, if you're using hidden ESSIDs for security, it's not a very secure technique. Consensus seems to be you're better off using WPA-PSK mode with a random key. We talked about it here in this thread, and here's my post from there.

Good Luck..

 

You should check out Wicd. When I got frustrated with KNetworkManager's flakiness, I tried out Wicd, and it's 10x better than KNetworkManager. While it's a GTK application, it doesn't require any GNOME dependencies (only Python/PyGTK), so using it in KDE shouldn't be too bad.

 

The prime advantage of Wicd is that it does not need runlevel 5, X running, and an applet loaded in order to function. It modifies your network configuration directly.

 

Thanks jas, I will look to see if I can fin nm-editor on my install.

As far as security, I know that having a hidden ESSID is not enough. This is not my only security. I am using this in conjunction with MAC address filtering and WPA2 encryption.

 

Thanks srunni. You answered a question that I had on the back of my mind. Since I am running Kubuntu with KDE I was worried that Wicd would pull in all kinds of GNOME dependencies. I will try Wicd out. I tried to find it using Adept and it didn't find anything in the repos with that name, don't know why.

KnetworkManager seems to work, but like you said is flaky. For example I typed my network details in twice and it lists it twice in the list of available networks. One other point is that it seems that Knetworkmanager is tied to Kwallet, as Kwallet asks to to store my network password details in it. Don't understand all the details just yet.

 

Well,
I tried Wicd and had even worse results than Knetworkmanager. I installed Wicd and the interface seems more intuitive than Knet, but I ran into some really weird issues. First, somehow it saw my hidden network, not sure how, no big deal. Then when I went to connect to my network it would just hang. I tried several times and then my interface died. I tried to start it back up but the interface is not coming back.. What is even more strange is that somewhere in the set of background processes I must be hooked to my network since I can get to the internet! I can't find Wicd anywhere, not in my system tray and can't find it in the list of processes but I am hooked up to the web. I just shutdown the machine and plan to remove Wicd. Does anybody know any other alternatives to a good network manager in Linux that I can try?

 

Ok,
Tired of replying to my own thread, but here goes

I am starting to like Wicd a lot more. Once I got through my initial problems that I mentioned in my last post, I have had good luck. Here are some of my thoughts if anyone is interested..

- It connects and disconnects to my Wifi network very very quickly, faster than Vista's native Network manager, IBMs Access connection program and Knetworkmanager.
- It remembers my Wifi's password, but doesn't remember my network's ESSID. Kind of weird, I have to Go to the hidden network option and type my ESSID name each time, and as soon as I do it associates it with some kind of existing entry in the list with the network password. Still not exactly what I wanted which was to create a network profile that stored my network ESSID and password and I click connect. Better than Knetworkmanager though.