Wireless Connection With Network Manager in FC3

by Jim Lawrence on Jan 31, 2005 (UPDATED 2005-02-06)

Related Documents
* Simple Wireless
* Advanced Wireless

This walk through should be very painless if all required software is installed. What you'll need
is the following. You should also be able to connect to the internet or home network with the wireless
Tools supplied with Fedora Core.

• A Wireless device (card, or internal)
• Network Manager
• Network Manager-Gnome

So, to see what you have installed open a terminal window swithch user to root with su - If you
don't know what the dash means, read the man page for su -. So eith that out of the way, lets see what
we have installed. The easiest way to find out is go to Applications --> System Tools --> System Logs
Click the RPM Packages on the left and scroll through the list.

Make sure you have the following
* NetworkManager-0.3.3-1.cvs20050119.2.fc3
* NetworkManager-gnome-0.3.3-1.cvs20050119.2.fc3
These 2 are the latest as of this posting. If you don't have NetworkManager installed, you can install it with
yum in the terminal.

# yum install NetworkManager NetworkManager-gnome

Well now your probably wondering how all this works and what to do next. So go to Applications--> System Settings-->Server Settings-->Services. In the window that opens up look for NetworkManager, check the box to the left of it and click the Start button.  At the top, click the Save button. It is probably a good idea to reboot, so, make sure no devices get started at boot and continue on.

In the terminal window exit to your profile and type in NetworkManagerInfo. this should start the deamon
and you should see a sweeping radar.

Depending on how you are connected, you might be disconnected from you connection because of NM.
After a few seconds, you should be reconnected and be able to browse. If your AP

<> is a secure AP, then you will be prompted to insert the Access key. if you use a WEP encrypted AP try the dropdown
with <> list in the messagebox and choose the Hex option. If you ever change your AP key, open up Gnome-conf editor with Application-->System Settings-->Configuration Editor and drill down to /system/networking/wireless/networks/yournetworkname and you can change the key and if needed you can also add more access points mac address thereas well.

I hope this was helpful and you can conviently change between network devices rather painlessly. To read on how NM works visit "How it works"