A couple of days ago I replaced Gentoo Linux with Kubuntu on my old laptop. I didn’t have the time, and the laptop probably didn’t have the power, to keep compiling every program I wanted to install. As a consequence of the switch, I got to use the nifty new KDE 4 which comes with a little network management applet that looks absolutely gorgeous, but unfortunately doesn’t work.

Well, didn’t work. I fixed it, though, by following the suggestions at http://uncleham.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/kubuntu-904-wpapsk-nobroadcast/ — I would detail my procedure here but it’d just be a repeat of what you can find at that link, with a couple of notable differences: (1) my router broadcasts its SSID, and (2) “Connect automatically” works fine for me. No need to reenter the encryption key at every login.

I actually have a hunch about why this worked, and I don’t think it had anything to do with using the “Connect to hidden network” button. When I clicked the button, I made a point of not filling in any configuration settings that I didn’t have to. Checking it over afterwards, the one obvious difference between my previous connection profile which didn’t work, and the new one which did, is that the new one didn’t have the BSSID (the router’s MAC address) set. I’m guessing that that was my mistake all along, and that the new KDE 4.2 network manager applet does flaky stuff that it shouldn’t with the BSSID. But I’m not particularly inclined to pursue the issue, since now I have two working computers on my home network. Yay :-)