The Control Center module
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The Control Center module

The configuration module in the KDE Control Center is perhaps the most useful part of the KWiFiManager suite. Here you can actually change the basic settings of your wireless LAN card. The module can manage up to four independent configurations for the card, and it can even automatically set your card up whenever you log into KDE. Since establishing a network connection is a possible security hazard, any changes to the configuration can only be done by root.

The Configuration Tabs

The upper part of the control center module consists of four tabs labelled Config 1 through Config 4. Each of these tabs can hold a configuration for your WLAN card.

The most important settings are always visible, the cryptography and power management options are only shown when activated. The perhaps most important element in each configuration tab is the field Network name. Here you can specify which network you would like to log into. You can either specify the name of your network directly, or you can try a scan on all available networks by setting the network name to ANY.

In addition to the network name, you have to specify the type of network to log into. That's the purpose of the button group Operation mode. The option Infrastructure means that the network consists of designated base station, so-called “access points” or “residential gateways”. This is the most common operation mode for company networks. The second option, peer-to-peer means that your network is just a direct connection between computers, without access points.

Yu can optionally set the connection speed for your connection. The setting auto should do for most uses, since the card will determine the appropriate speed itself. However, if you find that the speed changes every few seconds, for example when you have a weak connection, you can set the speed manually.

Below these configuration items you will find a field named Execute script on connect:. Here you can enter the name of a script to execute. It will be executed whenever you hit the Activate configuration button and, optionally, automatically when you start the Control Center module. The script will have root rights. This may lead to problems if you want to start an X application in the script and the X server belongs to someone else than root. You can make such scripts work correctly if you execute the X application via kdesu -u USERNAME -c COMMAND.

The lower part of each configuration tab holds the cryptography settings. These settings are only shown if you check the box Use cryptography?. If shown, you are presented with numerous options:

Key to use:

You can define up to four secret keys for each configuration, in this field you can set which one you actually want to use to encrypt network traffic

Crypto mode:

When encryption is activated, there are two ways to deal with incoming non-encrypted packets: discard or allow. When you set your card for Open mode, the card will also listen to non-encrypted packets. Restricted mode will only allow encrypted network packets, any other packets are discarded.

Crytpo keys:

This box lets you specify the secret keys to use for cryptography. The small box String? sets whether the key you enter to right is either a string like MY_CRYPTO, or, if not checked, a hex value like 0A2FEE91. To protect your passwords, only asterisks will be shown when you enter a password.

Be aware that the built-in cryptography support (named WEP for Wireless Equivalent Privacy) is not very safe at all. See the section called “Security considerations on WEP cryptography” for details.

The last configuration element that remains to be described is the power management. When checking the box Enable Power Management you will be presented some options that can help you save energy. The first two input fields named Sleep duration (ms) and Awaken time (ms) describe the periodicity of network scans for your wireless LAN card. The card will turn the radio antenna off for the time period in milliseconds specified in Sleep duration. Afterwards it will be active for Awaken time and will in that time scan for a network connection. If no network connection is found, it will go to sleep again and the cycle begins again. The box named Receive packets below lets you specify which packets the card should listen to when awaken. You can either select Unicast only (which will only let your card listen to packets sent specifically to your card), Multi/Broadcast only (will only listen to packets sent to multiple machines and discard packets directed to your card) or Both. Most people should select the default value Both.

Auto-configuration on KDE Control Center Module startup

If you wish, you can make KWiFiManager initialize your wireless LAN card whenever you start the KDE Control CenterModule. To do so, check the box Load preset configuration on Control Center Module startup and select the number of the configuration you want to use in the listbox below. If you want to set the card to these settings at once, push the button Activate configuration.

Autodetecting your device

KWiFiManager needs to know the interface name of your wireless LAN card to change any settings. You can either enter the information (e.g. eth1 or wlan0) manually in the input field right of Settings apply to interface:, or let KWiFiManager auto-detect the interface. To do so, push the button Autodetect interface. This will perform a scan on all interfaces listed in /proc/net/dev to find your card. The result of the scan will show up in the input field beside the button. If the field remains empty, no card was found. Please note that KWiFiManager uses the wireless extensions to detect cards. If you use a card controlled by the wlan-ng package, KWiFiManager only shows correct results if your driver has a compatibility layer for the wireless extensions built-in.

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