Camarabuntu laptops and wpa

[AlexB]

All,

Last Saturday we were struggling to get the wifi up and running for
Hester's laptops to go out with the volunteers.

Two laptops had Camarabuntu based on 7.1 Gutsy Gibbon, but three had
8.04 Hardy Heron. Both installations work for unencrypted 802.11
networks, and for wep encrypted networks; they have simple point and
click interfaces in the toolbar. They also have the wpa_supplicant, so
you can connect to wpa/wpa2 networks via the command line (editing /
etc/network/interfaces), but they don't have NetworkManager, which you
need to be able to connect to wpa networks using a simple point and
click interface. We figured they'd need to support wpa as most wifi
networks are these days.

NetworkManager wasn't available in the Synaptic menu, even with the
proper sources.list. Eventually, our solution was to upgrade the
distro, as there were other dependencies with NetworkManager, and we
needed to get them working by 4pm! This works on the nice ibm laptops
we had on Saturday, but we may have to repeat this for older laptops
which will struggle with later versions. Another slight issue was that
we had to do a /etc/init.d/networking restart in /etc/rc.local, as the
wpa_supplicant wasn't starting in time when the network was going
up... wierd.

Does anyone have any ideas how to get NetworkManager working smoothly
with 7.1?

cheers,

Alex