On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 08:11:47PM -0500, Damon Chesser wrote: > Of course not, but the average user does not set this up anyway, the IT geek > that gives him or her the box does. Mmm ... well, not quite. Check out how OS X handles this. Or how Windows does, for that matter. Under OS X, I go to a dropdown menu and get a list of all the available hotspots in my area. I select the one I want. If I need a WEP or WPA key to access it, OS X prompts me for it. I click a checkbox to save that key in my Keychain. From then on, OS X will never ask me for the key; the next time I come near that hotspot, it will automatically provide the stored key. Presumably it has saved the WEP/WPA key on disk, mapped to the hotspot's MAC address. Linux should be doing the same. I don't think OS X will store the ESSID of a hotspot that uses a hidden ESSID, even if the user has typed in that ESSID before. OS X certainly provides no easy facility for cracking WEP/WPA keys, a la airsnort, and remembering those keys later on. I'm not sure how to make OS X prioritize hotspots. In Windows it's easy. All of this should be equally easy in Linux, if we expect to compete. And it must be a GUI. I intend to perform an experiment, whereby I don't touch the command line -- or apps like mutt that scare end users -- for a month. I'm curious how well I'd do. Not so well at the moment, given that I'm running the development (Breezy) build of Ubuntu, and I need to make the /dev/input/mice node to get X to start. But maybe it'll be possible once Breezy stabilizes. -- Stephen R. Laniel steve@laniels.org +(617) 308-5571 http://laniels.org/ PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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