Bug#362072: gnome-system-tools: network-admin usage report

[Michael Gilbert]

Package: gnome-system-tools
Version: 1.4.1-2
Severity: normal

i was at a hotel this past week seeking to use my debian box to connect 
to the free, as in you paid for our hotel and you may use our internet 
access upon agreeing to a click-through agreement, wireless access.  
they told me that i could not use my internal wireless card, and needed 
to plug in their card via cat 5 to the wired ethernet port.  they also 
handed me a pamphlet that basically said set your ssid to "hotel-ssid".

anyway, i wanted to see how "easy" it would be to get connected with tools
available to me on my supermodern gnome desktop.  so, i go into
network-admin and look at the properties for eth0.  well, since eth0 is a
wired interface, there is no option to enter the ssid.  so network-admin
was no help for me, the naive user, in this situation.  

because network-admin failed me, i manually edited 
/etc/network/interfaces and got things going that way -- no big deal for 
the technically apt, but far beyond the means of an average end-user.

once i got the wireless connection up and running, i decided that i 
would see if i could use network admin to store this as a location (in 
case i ever come back).  so i set this as a hotel configuration, and set up
my home configuration as  another location.  well, since my home
configuration was invalid at this location, the "changing profile" operation
took an extremely long time (like 3 minutes).  why should the user have to
wait this long?  can't it work behind the scenes?  can't it detect that the
network is not available quicker?

i noticed that changing location actually modifies my 
/etc/network/interfaces.  where are my non-active locations 
saved at?  and why can't the locations all be stored in
/etc/network/interfaces via interface naming schemes?  i think this would
be less prone to error.

the moral of the story is that network-admin should be flexible enough 
to allow the user to treat any interface as wireless if he/she chooses.  
also, network-admin shouldn't waste so much time switching between 
network locations, and if it has to, it should be behind the scenes.  
and finally, it should be clearer what network-admin is doing in terms 
of locations (where are other location settings saved at?).

thank you for your consideration and hard work.

mike



-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (600, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages gnome-system-tools depends on:
ii  gconf2                   2.14.0-1        GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libart-2.0-2             2.3.17-1        Library of functions for 2D graphi
ii  libatk1.0-0              1.11.3-1        The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libbonobo2-0             2.14.0-1        Bonobo CORBA interfaces library
ii  libbonoboui2-0           2.10.1-2        The Bonobo UI library
ii  libc6                    2.3.6-3         GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libcairo2                1.0.2-3         The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra
ii  libfontconfig1           2.3.2-1.1       generic font configuration library
ii  libgconf2-4              2.14.0-1        GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglade2-0              1:2.5.1-2       library to load .glade files at ru
ii  libglib2.0-0             2.10.1-2        The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgnome-keyring0        0.4.9-1         GNOME keyring services library
ii  libgnome2-0              2.12.0.1-5      The GNOME 2 library - runtime file
ii  libgnomecanvas2-0        2.14.0-1        A powerful object-oriented display
ii  libgnomeui-0             2.12.1-1        The GNOME 2 libraries (User Interf
ii  libgnomevfs2-0           2.12.2-5        GNOME virtual file-system (runtime
ii  libgtk2.0-0              2.8.16-1        The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                  6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libnautilus-extension1   2.12.2-2        libraries for nautilus components 
ii  liborbit2                1:2.14.0-1      libraries for ORBit2 - a CORBA ORB
ii  libpango1.0-0            1.12.0-2        Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libpopt0                 1.7-5           lib for parsing cmdline parameters
ii  libsm6                   6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System Session Management
ii  libx11-6                 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System protocol client li
ii  libxcursor1              1.1.3-1         X cursor management library
ii  libxext6                 6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System miscellaneous exte
ii  libxi6                   6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System Input extension li
ii  libxinerama1             6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System multi-head display
ii  libxml2                  2.6.23.dfsg.2-3 GNOME XML library
ii  libxrandr2               6.9.0.dfsg.1-6  X Window System Resize, Rotate and
ii  libxrender1              1:0.9.0.2-1     X Rendering Extension client libra
ii  perl                     5.8.8-3         Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  system-tools-backends    1.4.2-1         System Tools to manage computer co
ii  zlib1g                   1:1.2.3-11      compression library - runtime

Versions of packages gnome-system-tools recommends:
ii  gksu                          1.3.6-1    graphical frontend to su
ii  gnome-control-center          1:2.12.3-2 utilities to configure the GNOME d

-- no debconf information