Ubuntu community at work

A major problem for security conscious laptop users in linux has always been the rather ad hoc and technically difficult WPA support. WPA enables users to use potentially very difficult to crack encryption on their laptops. It has been possible with many wireless nics to set this up but it is complex and not an out of the box experience.



The solution for easy to use laptop networking being tossed around by developers in Ubuntu has been the NetworkManager which offers a potentially seamless switching between wired and wireless connections. Until recently however WPA did not work all that well with this convenient panel applet. Version 0.6 however looks much better.



The ubuntu devs have argued against putting this into Dapper (the next release of Ubuntu) because of the difficulties involved in this beta software. So many people were annoyed at this that the community (not the developers) has come up with the goods:



https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperNetworkManager?highlight=(Dapp...

And now the developers have tentatively agreed to seriously consider putting this into a standard Dapper install. The delayed release date has helped.



Kudos to the Ubuntu community which is this distros greatest strength!

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