Wireless made easy with Netapplet

In general, connecting wirelessly to the Internet is beyond most new Linux users. There is simply too much tweaking needed - until now! Enter the world of Netapplet. SuSE users have already noticed this little beauty, but I think that other distos need to follow their lead on this.

After several of my favorite operating systems and distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great little GNOME applet in Novell’s SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice (if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by using iwlist and iwconfig, but it’s nice to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux distribution. Once you’ve got this program on your GNOME-based laptop, you’ll wonder how you ever did mobile computing without it.

Novell also makes an applet for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) called KInternet, which can do the same things that Netapplet can do, except it does them from KDE instead of GNOME. One of the co-authors of the Netapplet project, Robert Love, is now working on a similar project hosted by Red Hat called Network Manager, although it has not yet reached a 1.0 release.

A search through Freshmeat and SourceForge reveals several other, similar projects. But the one that worked best for me on GNOME in GNU/Linux was Netapplet. [Read the rest]