kopete

I'm always losing my wireless connection and since I usually use distros that use KDE, I get the infamous disappearing act of the wireless utility (KNetwork Manager).

I have one question: why don't the various distro developers develop/create their own wireless utility instead of relying on Network Manager? I also think the other apps don't work from my experience. So, don't tell me to use WICD. I've tried it. It was no better.

Instead of pretty effects, the KDE project should try to build a half decent wireless utility. They are unable to, currently, and this is through several kernel upgrades and various changes to all the distros. Therefore developers should take it upon themselves to improve the state of wireless in Linux.

I'm just tired of wireless 'dying' and then having to troubleshoot the problem. So far, I've read that you need usb devices unplugged except for the wireless usb adapter. I think that helped me initially but I just discovered my wireless is not working. It's in a Debian-based distro and I have had this experience before - in Kubuntu, Mepis, Debian etc.

My other critique is that I cannot even use it at all in Ubuntu LiveCD (Gnome) so I didn't bother with it. I think that is pretty bad if KDE is troublesome but Gnome IS NON EXISTENT. I think the Gnome menu is even more limiting and I don't see how wireless works in there.

My last concern is that I know my usb wireless adapter works. It's a Belkin usb wireless adapter F5D7050 version 4 using the Zydas chipset. I know it works in Linux so that is not the problem. It works out of the box, it's just that the software used is really bad and this applies to all Linux distros that use the default wireless utilities.

I don't think there is any solution to the problem unless the developers devote some time to the issue. I guess I have to diagnose my own problem and I suppose that will include experimentation and trial and error until I solve it.

Thanks for reading...