Ubuntu Hardy and networking on a laptop from several locations

This was a very nice surprise.
I bring my laptops back and forth from home to work. My home internet access is with a DSL router, using DHCP, no proxy, both wired and wireless. At work, my university use static IPs, an automatic proxy, their DNS, wired connexion etc.. Since I’ve been using Linux, I have worked with conf files (/etc/network/interface, /etc/resolv.conf, /apt/apt.conf etc.) twice a day, at work and back. That was much of a pain.. network-manager was not able to handle this easily, or not even at all.

I tried the other day, just to see how network-manager (Version: 0.6.6-0ubuntu5) was doing after a fresh Hardy install on a new computer (I’m using GNOME on this one). All my issues are solved!

• I saved locations in the manual configuration for network-manager, and can switch easily between the two:

  

  Just click the green arrow after choosing a location, and go!

• The wireless is set to roaming, and I can pick up my box without any problems:



• The general GNOME proxy setting menu is enough for everything (Firefox, Epiphany, aptitude etc.):

  

Many thanks to all the devs and individuals who made this happen :)

Medibuntu: non-free-codecs for hardy

Due to the interest to my previous post on gutsy, here is the procedure to install non-free-codecs on hardy:

• Add the Medibuntu repositories to your sources.list:

  ## Medibuntu.
  deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

• Add the key to your keyring, reload the sources.list file and install the package:

  wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs

You need to add the key if you got to this article searching for the following error:

W: GPG error: http://packages.medibuntu.org hardy Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 2EBC26B60C5A2783

Here is the package description for the *codecs from Medibuntu:

bapoumba@scorpio:~$ sudo aptitude show non-free-codecs
Package: non-free-codecs
New: yes
State: installed
Automatically installed: yes
Version: 1.1
Priority: extra
Section: non-free/metapackages
Maintainer: Medibuntu Packaging Team <admin@lists.medibuntu.org>
Uncompressed Size: 32.8k
Depends: w32codecs
Description: Non-free codecs
 This package depends on the binaries codecs package matching your architecture
 (w32codecs for i386, w64codecs for amd64 and ppc-codecs for powerpc systems). 
 
 It can be safely removed.

Enjoy!