This project aims to create a GNOME-based panel applet and management tool to manage wireless network cards that support Linux wireless extensions. You can find a list of such cards at Jean Tourrilhes's Linux & Wireless LANs page. Many IEEE 802.11 compatible cards fall into this category, including the Lucent Orinoco and Applet Airport.

The complete set of tools is called gWireless. Currently, gWireless consists of two basic tools which are in early development stages. The most visible tool (and one that works with basic functionality today) is a link quality monitor applet (called gwireless_applet). Quality is displayed by altering green and red values of the applet. The better the link quality, the more green the display. Red values are the complement (? ... max - green value) of the green values (for example, if green is 255 then red is 0, green 200 then red 55, etc.). So, red is bad, orange (or muddy brown) is moderate to poor, and green is good. The applet will display blue if there are no wireless adapters listed in /proc/net/wireless.

The second tool is called gwireless and represents the bulk of the functionality. It's primary mandate is to provide a GUI for iwconfig, the main wireless tools utility. For rev 1.0, gwireless will only provide functionality for commonly used functions (ESSID, mode, encryption , first key only). Later revisions will track iwconfig and related tools for functionality. This tool is still not functional yet.

In the short term future, I'd like to enhance the panel applet to provide most if not all of the features found in the windows tools that come with my Orinoco card, including listing and switching networks interactively. Unfortunately, much of this depends on features that aren't in the current Orinoco drivers, though a number of people are working on that problem (including myself).

Oh yeah. PLEASE report any and all bugs you find to the Sourceforge Project Page . You can enter bugs via this page. You can also browse existing bugs and other issues by visiting the project page at SourceForge. Thanks.

Sujal