netcfg v2.5rc1 This is easily the biggest release since 2.0. Many new features and some significant changes under the hood. There are also a few features which have had changed options and this needs to be noted. The most notable is that net-auto has been removed in favour of the net auto wireless setup. # Move to new auto-wireless The new automatic connection has proper roaming support and will prove more reliable than the old setup - particularly with more complicated wireless configurations. To migrate to the new automatic wireless setup: 1. pacman -S core/wpa_actiond 2. Set WIRELESS_INTERFACE="" to your wireless interface in /etc/rc.conf. For example WIRELESS_INTERFACE="wlan0" 3. Add net-auto-wireless to your DAEMONS=() array. # New features: - net-auto-wireless/wpa_actiond - Real wireless roaming/auto connection. Based on same principle as autowifi. Requires optional dependency: wpa_actiond - net-auto-wired - automatic ethernet configuration. Requires optional dependency: ifplugd - Interface configurations - set options for all profiles using an interface - Radio Kill switch awareness - requires enabling, see wiki. - Output hooks - Significant internal cleanup & improvement # Internal changes: - Uses wpa_supplicant for all wireless configuration by default, including wep/none security. This adds improves support for most and should improve reliability. - Uses iproute by default for all static configuration. net_tools which contains ifconfig is effectively obsolete and hasnt seen a release for over 8 years. The 'ethernet-iproute' and 'ethernet' connection types have been merged together to simply 'ethernet'. All options are still supported and existing configurations will continue to work for both types. A symlink has been made to ensure that profiles using 'ethernet-iproute' will continue to function. # Changes in configuration options - net-auto and AUTO_NETWORKS is now deprecated in favour of net-auto-wireless/net-auto-wired. - wireless: If you were previously specifying the wpa_supplicant driver in WPA_OPTS, you now need to specify it in WPA_DRIVER. - wireless: iwconfig based configuration for wep/none can be used by changing to wep-old or none-old. This should not be necessary and is left in place only for the possibility of very old drivers that do not support wpa_supplicant. - ethernet-iproute: Now that 'ethernet' is iproute based, those using 'ethernet-iproute' can change the name back. There is a symlink in place however, so existing configurations of either name will continue to function regardless. - wireless-dbus: This idea didn't really go anywhere and is now unsupported. The wpa_supplicant dbus interface is a huge pain and it doesn't fit well into the netcfg codebase. It is no longer included, however netcfg will automatically use 'wireless' for any 'wireless-dbus' configurations as the supported options are effectively the same. # Download: netcfg 2.5rc1 is in [testing]. The source is on the Arch Linux ftp and latest PKGBUILD in svn. ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/other/netcfg/netcfg-2.5.0rc1.tar.gz # Documentation: The wiki has been updated to reflect this release. For 2.5, the documentation can be found at: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Network_Profiles_development When it is released this will be moved to the Network Profiles page. There's also some updated documentation of the supported options for 'wireless' and 'ethernet' here: http://www.rayner.id.au/netcfg/ Keep in mind that wireless supports all the options of 'ethernet'. If options are not documented, then it's a bug and they should be (or it's deprecated, but should be mentioned anyway for completeness). # Contributors: I had a few big contributors to this release: Jim Pryor: Many internal changes and improvements Thomas Bächler: wpa_actiond based auto roaming/connection Thanks guys! That's all for now, please file any bug reports on the bug tracker. James