Connect Me Already
I was happy to see that the version of Wireless Assistant (a KDE GUI for connecting to WiFi networks) inluded in Ubuntu Dapper seems to work a lot better than the version included in Ubuntu Breezy. At last it finds my wireless network and allows me to connect to it after specifying the appropriate keys.
I’m rather saddened to find, however, that it doesn’t apply the settings to the default config (eg. /etc/network/interfaces) so that my laptop would connect to the wireless network on boot… Instead it seems to rely on me logging into KDE and using the Wireless Assistant to connect each time. How lame. I will of course have to now just edit the files manually as before and only use the Wireless Assistant when I want to connect to some network whilst out and about.
I think that GUI application designers sometimes miss the point with this sort of thing. They seem to assume that because I’m making changes to settings from within KDE, that I’d only want them to be applicable for KDE and not generally system wide. It’s the same with adding printers for example. If I add a printer from within some nice GUI inside KDE I still want to be able to print to it using lpr when I’m at the command line. I think GUIs are great for making configuration changes, especially to things that aren’t changed frequently, but they really should be GUIs to the system wide config IMHO.