“After several of my favorite operating systems and
distributions failed to properly connect to wireless hotspots
without a lot of command-line tweaking, I found Netapplet, a great
little GNOME applet in Novell’s SUSE 9.3 Professional that scans
for 802.11a/b/g wireless networks and shows you their signal
strength and ESSID. You can then select the hotspot of your choice
(if several are available) and continue on to the Internet from
there. Yes, you can do the same thing from the command line by
usingiwlistandiwconfig, but it’s nice
to have it done automatically. Although Novell engineers created
Netapplet for SUSE Linux, it can be installed on any GNU/Linux
distribution. Once you’ve got this program on your GNOME-based
laptop, you’ll wonder how you ever did mobile computing without
it…”