On: The sad state of Linux Wi-Fi

[antocv]

Same here, I kind of never got NetworkManager to do any good, I just gave up, so mii-tool, dhcpcd, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant are well used tools, basically it works fine, when I actually have the drivers. These tools dont bail out on me or try to hide complexities behind more complex abstractions like NetworkManager does. If im going to be troubleshooting anything, its going to be the networking issue and not dbus to networkmanager interface or policy files.

[clarry → antocv]

So basically you need four different tools to set up networking? Well, it sure sounds like the complexities are there and in plain sight then. I can't help but wonder though if it isn't possible to get rid of some of these complexities and make life simpler?

[taylorbuley → clarry]

It's not as complicated as it sounds in practice and can take the form of a simple config block in /etc/network/interfaces

        iface wlan0 inet dhcp

                wireless-essi DE:C0:D1:F1:ED  

                wireless-mode managed  

                wpa-ssid "Your SSID"  

                wpa-psk "YourPassword123"

[rockymeza → clarry]

I wrote a python app/CLI program for dealing with those couple of programs.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wifi/0.3.1

It works ok and just wraps ifup and iwlist. It also reads and writes /etc/network/interface style config, so you can see what's going on under the hood.

But I agree. Getting it all work the first time (or when I encounter a new type of network) is just ridiculous.

[antocv → clarry]

I dont know, possibly, I see now that mii-tool is packaged together with ip. So really, it depends, it is different layers - different tools , but could still package all together into one package and have one syntax for all. wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd should go under the net-tools/ip package too.

ip link should also show the information of link-speed from mii-tool, ip addr should take an dhcp argument instead of requiring a separate dhcpcd. Then merge wpa_supplicant into ip, perhaps make a ip-wlink which requires some SSID/keyphrase to set it to "up" state.

So wpa_supplicant dhcpcd iwconfig/iwlist/scan-tools should be merged to net-tools and have same syntax as the rest of the net-tools package.

But yeah, even then you need to learn the layers and set them up. In my opinion Windows got it wrong, its user interface is horrible and people often complain about networking problems which are really UI problems or bugs in Windows/drivers there too.

This problem is classic - networking is a stack and thats a fact, and the best tools/UI is one which allows you to dig through that stack layer by layer. On windows its all or nothing.