Pwireless2

This is extremely interesting! Forum member jemimah has rewritten our Pwireless program (developed by plinej (Jason)):

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48816

Quoting:

As some of you may know, wpa_supplicant is a network management daemon that runs in the background on your computer and connects you to wireless networks. It supports open networks, WEP networks, and WPA networks.

Puppy supports wpa_supplicant with the Network Wizard, but not in roaming mode. Roaming mode is a godsend for people with laptops who may need to reconfigure their wireless network several times a day. In roaming mode, you set up each network one time, and wpa_supplicant will automatically connect to it whenever you're in range. If multiple networks are in range, you can set priorities to tell wpa_supplicant which one you prefer.

Until now, the only way to configure wpa_supplicant roaming mode was by editing the configuration files by hand, or use wpa_gui (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=47838). Wpa_gui has a somewhat confusing interface and requires large Qt libraries, so I thought it was time someone wrote a lightweight GUI frontend that was specifically designed for and integrated into Puppy.

Pwireless2 looks much the same as the original Pwireless but the guts are totally replaced. Pwireless2 uses wpa_cli to communicate with wpa_supplicant. Wpa_supplicant handles profile storage, and all network configuration tasks. I've also included an upgraded version of Dhcpcd which handles allocating Ip addresses and notifying you when the status of your network changes.

Finally, I've modified a program called gtrayicon to provide you with a very basic networking tray applet. Clicking on the applet will tell wpa_supplicant to start or stop (clicking it if you haven't configured any networks won't do much of anything). Right click and choose Configure to launch the Pwireless2 configuration gui.

Jemimah, this is a great initiative.
Guys, test it!

A note on the original Pwireless. Plinej created it, and HairyWill and urban-soul did some further work. I think the most recent version is 0.8.4:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=23121

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Comments

start


I don't think so
Username: 01micko
"Raffy said [i]Good to see there a good start by Jemimah. Maybe he is G2 in another name. :D (G2 was an excellent coder in the Forum. He's been silent for some time.)[/i] Unless G2 (whom I do not know of) is female then I don't think she is G2. Jemimah has made a few references to her husband in posts and her (I assume 'her') forum avatar is girly. I think it's great. There are not enough women involved in Linux generally I feel, but they are probably at least half of the business users of computers out there in cyberspace. (Er, I'm happily married and my wife uses linux!) Go for it jemimah!

Multiple access?
Username: Tony
"Did I read somewhere that you can have more than one pipe to the net which firefox etc can use? If roaming and you have more than one access point could it use more than one especially useful if they are both poor connections?

ThoughtJourney
Username: BarryK
"Years ago we had a great developer who was female. She developed the JWM Configuration tool. I think that she also did the anything-to-pdf converter. Then one day she announced that a baby was on the way, and I think also she left work to become a full-time mother. Haven't heard from her since. It would be nice to send a message to the old-timers like ThoughtJourney and GuestTwo, just to say "Hi, how yah going?!" Let them know we appreciate their contribution and still remember them.

Thanks!
Username: jemimah
"Just to put the speculation to rest, I can confirm that I am, in fact, female. :) Thank you everybody for the encouragement and support! You can read more than you ever wanted to know about women geeks and nerds here: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki My personal opinion on why there aren't more female hackers can be gleaned by examining the following chart: http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gender/ and referring to the INTJ and INTP female sections. I don't know why it breaks down this way, but I don't think it's the result of institutionalized sexism. My personal experiences can be summed up fairly accurately by this entry in the Jargon file: http://www.jargon.8hz.com/html/demographics.html

Too busy for this kind of thing
Username: nic2109
"WARNING!!! Massive and simplistic generalisations coming up. Don't flame me; you have been warned! I reckon the answer is pretty simple: women have (a) so many other responsibilities that they take seriously, and (b) too much sense, that they just cannot bring themselves to spend much time on this kind of stuff. I'm afraid that the popular image of the slighly sad, introverted guy sat at his computer avoiding face-to-face relationships is uncomfortably close to truth.

Stereotypes continued
Username: nic2109
"Yeah - I accept totally that it needn't have anything to do with gender. However thousands of years of patriarchy have ensured that the child-bearers are also the child-rearers and home-makers and responsibility-takers so there's not much time left for staring at computers!

Tags: puppy