KDE 4.2 beta is great, wireless not

After the KDE 4.2 upgrade things seem very promising. Here is my Desktop with the Desktop applet, clock, sticky note, crystal monitor 8, Dolphin file browser and the panel (bottom of screen).



The KMenu with widget style "cleanlooks" and windows decoration as "Oxygen" looked strange with the black borders. Commonly accessed applications works very well, including the OOo3.0.1.




After upgrade the networking broke (most annoying was the wireless). Following are replacements apps;

1. KWlan
The KWlan which comes from standard ubuntu repositories provided a nice applet to replace the the default network manager. But the installation removed the initial KNetwork Manager which stopped the Network Manager. Wireless was still not working properly as I did not see the WPA option, only WEP connection was available. Checked the iwl3945 but it gave a blank output;

sudo modinfo iwl3945

You need to restart networking with the following command;

sudo /etc/init.d/networking start

2. wcid
Wicd is an alternative tool which is not dependant on KDE. With installation instructions from wicd, it brought back networking to normal state. Future Kubuntu may include wicd.

Step 1: Add the wicd repository.
Open Adept (add/remove software) and add the third party repository

deb http://apt.wicd.net intrepid extras

Step 2: Add the wicd key.

wget -q http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Step 3: Install wicd.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wicd

Step 4: Configure the wired/wireless. Type

wicd

Select wired/wireless name and choose the small triangle to expand the menu. Enter the requied fields and choose "Connect". This shows a blinking colour for data tx/rx. Simple and nice!