dischord.org » Wireless networking in ‘modern’ Linux is fucking braindead.

Last night, in what can only be described as a moment of technical sadism, I decided to reinstall a Linux distribution on my PC.  Actually truth is I pretty much despise using Windows but I’m bored of having to hook up my MacBook everytime I want to get on with something other than games.  So why Linux?  Hardware support, and I guess professional interest to a certain extent seeing as that’s what I look after for a living (amongst other things).

Anyway, here’s a quick aside and some background.  I also have an IBM X40 which runs OpenBSD.  There’s a lot of OpenBSD devs that use the same laptop so the hardware support is pretty much fucking spot on.  It’s slightly creaky now given that it’s only a 1.4GHz Pentium M with a single GB of RAM, but for what I mainly do when I’m not playing games – which is run ratpoison + xterms + firefox – it’s plenty.  So my idea was to have the same setup but on my bigger ‘main’ PC, but using Linux as the support for the newer hardware is there.  Oh, and the wireless works fine with this machine at home.

Wireless networking – even with WPA-PSK etc. – in OpenBSD is easy.  It’s done The Unix Way (i.e as you would expect) via options to ifconfig.  The man page does a fantastic job of explaining what you need to do, which is basically pass a few options and the key in a specific format (encrypted with another tool) and you’re away.  Plumbing this up so that it works on boot is also as just as easy.

So onto Linux.  Now I’ve dabbled with wireless networking before in Linux and it wasn’t pretty.  wpa_supplicant, ndiswrappers for Windows network card drivers (not Linux’s fault, but still), and so on.  The documentation is poor, there’s multiple disparate pieces and all in all it gave me a headache at the time.  Fast forward a couple of years and so surely now this should all be a little simpler?  Apparently not.  We’ve had time to create stupidly pointless wobbly window animations, drop shadow effects, and equally redundant boot splash screens though I see.

To be fair, after installing Fedora 10 my initial impressions were good.  All hardware was properly detected and worked out of the box, and I configured the wireless network initially via the purty and seemingly helpful control panel applet which popped up in Gnome.  It all worked splendidly.  I didn’t much care for the large amount of turd that the installer placed on my disk in the form of internationalizations galore, ‘games’ I’ll never play, printing systems I’ll never use, but still – minor things that I can clean up afterwards, right?  First things first though – install ratpoison, disable GDM, and let’s go!

But wait, now I’m in ratpoison I no longer have a configured network.  Odd.  It seems Gnome provides a little applet that works as a front-end to the omnipotent NetworkManager that enables your wireless network when you login.  That seems somewhat counter intuitive and goes against everything that an established Unix admin would expect – networking should be ever present, whether you’re in X11 or not – but not to worry, must be easy to fix that right?  Let’s have a look at the man page for NetworkManager(1):

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server, and change nameservers whenever it sees fit, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

And that’s all of it, pretty much.  There’s a couple of references to nm-tool(1) and something else, but that’s your lot.  The man page for nm-tool is just as sparse.  No pointers to any configuration files, no word on command line options, nothing.  And this is supposed to ‘Just Work’?  After  digging around on various cretinous forums I found a some juju method of adding an undocumented option to one config file, rebooting, then pissing about with some system authorisation controls in Gnome, only to find that it still doesn’t work.

What a joke.