knetworkmanager with TKIP/AES-CCMP support and GNOME 2.20

A week ago Helmut Schaa submitted a set of changes to knetworkmanager. It now supports to chose the different security protocols used together with WPA. In other news the GNOME team released their desktop in the newest version, 2.20.

knetworkmanager

Knetworkmanager is KDE’s frontend for the famous NetworkManager tool. Together they enable KDE users to manage and even switch between different networks of different types.
One of the most important features is that these tools support various security setups out of the box. Especially Wi-Fi Protected Access, short WPA. Since NetworkManager version 0.6.5 additional WPA configurations often used in enterprise environments are also supported.

However, knetworkmanager was missing the GUI options for some of these. But that has been fixed now by Helmut Schaa in the current SVN version:

Besides the usual configuration options knetworkmanager now also contains options to select TKIP or AES-CCMP. It can also set to auto.

This is very important for German students (and others, I think): many wireless networks at German universities do require the WLAN client to use a TTLS/PAP/TKIP WPA connection with a given certificate from the university.
Thanks, knetworkmanager-team.

I will try to push update knetworkmanager packages for Fedora 7 and rawhide asap.

GNOME 2.20

The GNOME project has released version 2.20 of its desktop. And the release looks promising. Especially the search system integrated with the file dialog caught my attention – that is something we will still not have with KDE 4.0 afaik (at least not in an integrated version, KIO solutions are there already). Also the power manager seems to be a nice tool – I wonder if the battery detection tool uses a HAL database and therefore warnings generated by HAL or if it has its own database. The first way would mean that it could be easily adopted by KDE.
It definitely looks like a nice release.

Btw., I saw that the documentation page of GNOME, library.gnome.org features a totally new design. It looks nice and much, much friendlier and attracting than the old design. I wonder if/when they will switch over the entire page to the new design.