HOWTO: NetworkManager with WPA 1&2 Support

[mrogers]

Whoopie: YES! Thank you! You're awesome, I now have completely automatic wireless networking in linux (with WPA) for the first time.

[Jeff250]

Nice, I'll add a note about this in the HOWTO.

[Jeff250]

Yesterday, an update to dhcp3 broke my NM such that the applet would only make it as far as the first light being lit. Fortunately, today, another dhcp3 update seems to have fixed that problem. I don't know if anyone else experienced this, but it seems to be resolved.

P.S.
There's a new IPW2200 driver release to fix the DHCP bug. I'm going to update the guide to accommodate.

[godilleur]

First of all, great guide, much appreciated. I'm having a little bit of trouble however. When I go to install NM, I type ./autogen.sh and I get this:

/usr/bin/gnome-autogen.sh
checking for autoconf >= 2.53...
  testing autoconf2.50... not found.
  testing autoconf... found 2.59
checking for automake >= 1.7...
  testing automake-1.7... not found.
  testing automake-1.8... not found.
  testing automake-1.9... found 1.9.6
checking for libtool >= 1.5...
  testing libtoolize... found 1.5.22
checking for glib-gettext >= 2.2.0...
  testing glib-gettextize... not found.
***Error***: You must have glib-gettext >= 2.2.0 installed
  to build NetworkManager.  Download the appropriate package for
  from your distribution or get the source tarball at
    ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.2/glib-2.2.0.tar.gz

checking for intltool >= 0.30...
  testing intltoolize... found 0.34.2
checking for pkg-config >= 0.14.0...
  testing pkg-config... found 0.20
Checking for required M4 macros...
  glib-gettext.m4 not found
Checking for forbidden M4 macros...
***Error***: some autoconf macros required to build NetworkManager
  were not found in your aclocal path, or some forbidden
  macros were found.  Perhaps you need to adjust your
  ACLOCAL_FLAGS?

Am I missing anything short of downloading glib-gettext, or is there some package I should have installed that would include that?

[Jeff250]

Have you "sudo apt-get build-dep network-manager"?

[oscar]

Thanks for this excellent howto, I now have my wireless working perfectly on a nearly clean install of dapper flight 4.

I did have a few issues though:

Firstly you do not mention anywhere updating the wireless firmware. I downloaded mine from:
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/firmware.php
I extracted the files and then installed using:

cp *.fw /lib/firmware/$(uname -r)/

I am not sure if this is necessary or even what the version of the firmware already installed by default is but other howtos I have read for WPA install it.

Secondly I didnt have the source universe repositories enabled, I did have the binary but got an error when trying to

sudo apt-get build-dep wpasupplicant

Uncommenting the correct line in /etc/apt/sources.list solved it.

Finally i didnt have the dhcdbd package installed which caused an error doing the:

./autogen.sh

solved by apt-get

I also have an issue with network manager because it prompts me for my password to access the keyring every time I boot up, is there any way around this?

* Some of the steps listed here might not be 100% right, I did have a more detailed message composed but hit Shift+Backspace and crashed X, think I have solved that now.

[Jeff250]

I am not sure if this is necessary or even what the version of the firmware already installed by default is but other howtos I have read for WPA install it.

This is unnecessary because Dapper already includes the latest firmware for the IPW chips. In the case of the IPW2200, this is v2.4

Secondly I didnt have the source universe repositories enabled

I'll add a note about specifically enabling the source repositories.

i didnt have the dhcdbd package

Hmm, I don't know how this one got left out, but you're right in that it's not installed by default by Ubuntu. I'll add this to the NM install instructions.

I also have an issue with network manager because it prompts me for my password to access the keyring every time I boot up, is there any way around this?

Not to my knowledge. I know of no way of getting NM to not use the gnome keyring, so, unfortunately this is a side effect.* If there's a solution, it might be in configuring the gnome keyring to somehow remember any password forever. This doesn't seem immediately possible, but doing so would help this annoying side effect with all keyring applications. Gnome keyring is anal about not accepting 0-length passwords too.

* Actually you can choose to not store your password in the keyring, but then you're in an even worse predicament, having to retype your WPA password every time you boot up.

[godilleur]

Have you "sudo apt-get build-dep network-manager"?

Well, I thought I did, ha.

Installing now....

[godilleur]

Worked great!

Thanks for the help.

[zachtib]

does anyone know what the statis of this working with an atheros card is? I can connect to my pw anetwork fine with my card from the commandline, but would like it to integrate w/ network manager