Sugar doesn't yet support wpa_supplicant. Our whole network is wpa_supplicant controlled. So at home the little laptops have no network connection. That makes it annoying to use them as development platforms. So, today I tried to convert our network to be WEP-based (despite not liking the idea of an easily cracked network).

Unfortunately, I couldn't convince any of the regular laptops to log onto the WEP-based network (the little laptops worked fine). Okay, thinks I, I'll try to bridge my main laptop's network card in AP mode so that it can act as a WEP-based network when I plug it into the hardline connection. Except that the silly Firestarter scripts couldn't get the card into the right mode, so kept failing (after some research it seems that the card doesn't recognise "Master" or "Ad-Hoc" as valid modes).

Well, try at least getting NetworkManager working while I'm in there, maybe it will teach me something about how this is all supposed to work (I was considering tackling the WPA support in the network view)... nope, just frustrates the heck out of me, as the raw wpa-supplicant can setup the wpa connection fine, but NetworkManager always times out.

I think it's something as simple as a missing "driver" argument for wpa_supplicant, but I don't see where to configure that for NetworkManager. It's frustrating knowing how to make something happen at the command line but having no way to translate that into something you can use with the "simple" mechanism.

Anyway, parallel to all that I've been doing some real work, testing the newest build. Seems that there's a kernel bug that is expected to hard-hang the machine... which would match my experiences today. Lots of frozen machines and reboots. Apparently the plan is to revert the kernel.

Also been attempting to get sugar-jhbuild to build. I'm pretty close to just giving up on building outside of Fedora (which is sub-optimal for developers, it would be nice if Sugar was a simple emerge sugar or apt-get sugar away from a developer's desktop...). The bugs on Gentoo don't seem that significant (wrong library versions, build environment assumptions), but I just need to get to the point where I can do work on the environment and I can't, as a result, worry about having a comfortable working environment just now.

So I got the Fedora-7 based build finished. Heck of a long process, but as expected, it worked fine out of the box, even if it did take rather a long while. I'll see about packing up my build once I've tested the activities and have the desktop to the point where it makes a useful working environment (e.g. having an SVG editor, having a reasonable code editor, that kind of thing).