Now that I’ve been using my linux laptop with its new wireless connection, I wanted a way to switch between configurations for home (specific ESSID with encryption) and school (various ESSIDs with no encryption). I struggled with this for awhile using the system-config-network tool, which shows up in xfce as “Network Device Control” under the System menu and used to be called redhat-config-network in the RedHat days. However, I was having trouble getting multiple profiles to work, and the documentation wasn’t helping.

Finally I figured it out with the help of this guide on LinuxPlanet. Apparently settings in the default “Common” profile actually affects all profiles, which is why I was unable to get my Common (home) and School profiles to maintain separate settings. The key is to ignore the Common profile and create discrete new profiles for each actual set of settings you want to use.

Now if I could only figure out how to get the wireless card to just connect to any available AP without having to tell it an ESSID, since there are many AP’s in my department building. Apparently that problem is solved by NetworkManager, which is a replacement for the standard linux network service, but I haven’t had any luck getting that to work yet (for one thing, the UI component doesn’t work under xfce).

For now the way I’m dealing with this is to set up a profile in the system network tool for each AP that I connect to, and use the netprofile=[profile name] kernel param in grub.conf to choose between which one I want at startup.