AskFedora/2007-08-13

Intel IP2200 Wireless In Fedora 7
'' adrian.mowrey@gmail.com: I have a laptop (Inspiron B130) from Dell, and it has a wireless card (Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection). I also have a wireless connection established through a linksys router. How can I connect my laptop to the Internet by wireless? If you could explain to me whatever I have to do so that I can connect to the Internet by wireless, it will be very helpful for me as a beginner to Linux. Thank you.

Sincerely,

-- Adrian Mowre''

The kernel driver and firmware to support this card is included by default in Fedora 7. We recommend the Live images for desktop use which supports seamless wireless networking via Network Manager [1] which is enabled by default. If you have used the DVD image to install Fedora 7, you have to enable it manually. Network Manager is a background service that has both GNOME (nm-applet) and KDE (knetworkmanager) frontends.

Set the main service to automatically start on boot:

su -c '/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManager on'

Set the dispatcher service to automatically start on boot:

su -c '/sbin/chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManagerDispatcher on'

Start the background services:

su -c '/sbin/service NetworkManager start ; /sbin/service NetworkManagerDispatcher start'

In the next release, the plan [2] is to enable Network Manager by default and use it system wide.

[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/FeatureList

Distribution Upgrades And Peripherals
''William Brown : Why is it when I upgrade to a new version of the same distro some of my peripherals won't function? I was using Fedora 6 and upgrade to Fedora 7. I thought an upgrade was to fix bugs and make things more user friendly. OK, I have to agree the GUI looks better but the overall functionaly seems to be the same. If we want to introduce more people to the Linux community and the Open Software way of computing then the developers have to concentrate on making the distros more user friendly instead of more complicated???''

While the upgrades are intended to bring in more functionality and bug fixes, there tends to be some amount of regressions in newer releases too unfortunately. If you are having any issues with this release, do report those in Red Hat Bugzilla. In Fedora 7, the majority of work was on the infrastructure side merging in Fedora Core and Fedora Extras, open build system and distribution composing and customization tools, mirror manager etc but we did bring in a lot of new features for end users too[1]. Note that Fedora updates lifecycle [2] has been extended with Fedora 7 onwards to allow the flexibility for end users to skip alternative releases if necessary and if you believe that the advantages in the latest release are not compelling enough for you, you can take advantage of this flexibility while continuing to receive updates for the older version of Fedora.

We request the community to participate early in the testing process by using the development branch of Fedora called 'rawhide' or one of the three test releases, send feedback and report bugs[3]. Thank you for your support.

[1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f7/en_US/sn-OverView.html#sn-New-in-Fedora

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle

[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugsAndFeatureRequests

Yum Reverse Dependency Removal
'' Roberto Vanto : In my opinion yum should support reverse dependencies handling. Something like this: http://planet.sabayonlinux.org/?p=65 ''

Yum supports reverse dependencies just fine. Try, yum remove and yum will automatically list all the packages that depend on it and prompt for removing all of them. One of the requested enhancements to this is to remove packages that has been installed as dependencies for the package you are removing if they are only needed for that particular package and this feature is under development as a yum plugin [1]. Meanwhile package-cleanup utility which is part of yum-utils package in Fedora is quite handy for a number of similar things.

[1] https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/yum/2007-June/009933.html