Mobile Linux users face some interesting (OK, vexing) challenges when they want to plug into different networks. Any Linux system will easily support all manner of networking profiles--dialup, ISDN, Ethernet, wireless--the tricky bit is configuration. Manually re-configuring a PC for every connection is low on most users' lists of "fun things to do." You can be an ace scripting guru and fiddle up something yourself, or you can find a nice ready-made utility to do the work for you. Unfortunately, I have not found a universal utility to do this. However, there are a lot of utilities specific to various distributions, and an assortment of other utilities, like:

• Red Hat's Network Administration Tool
• KWiFiManager, the Wireless Lan Manager for KDE
• scpm for SUSE
• cardctl's scheme option
• Netenv, for Red Hat and any system that uses a Red Hat-type network configuration scheme, and Debian
• Whereami for Debian. This is more complex to understand, but it's versatile and tries to auto-detect and auto-configure. Whereami will have its own howto here someday.
• Mandrake users have Netprofile

This article will cover Red Hat's Network Administration Tool, because it also works on Fedora, and CentOS and other Red Hat clones; KWiFiManager, because it's a great little easy-to-use GUI app, and Netenv. Both Network Administration Tool and Netenv support all network devices: Ethernet, wireless, ISDN, dialup, whatever. KWiFiManager only supports wireless adapters, but it is useful and easy.

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