I have been *manually* dealing with my wired and wireless network interfaces on my laptop. I have a pair of config files (in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/: ifcfg-eth0 (wired: Intel Corporation 82540EP Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Mobile)) and ifcfg-eth1 (wireless: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter), both with USERCTL=true (and ifcfg-eth0 also has ONBOOT=true). I have manually fiddled with the ESSID, etc. in ifcfg-eth1 when needed, but this is tiresome. I would like to use NetworkManager, since this sounds like it might be easier. I don't use the GNome desktop, so I probably won't be able to use the stock GNome applet (this would not be a problem normally since I would just write my own GUI thingy, but there seems to be a complete lack of documentation for the GNome applet! But I have the source code and will figure it out eventually.). I use FVWM as a window manager and don't use a "desktop manager" at all. I run CentOS 4.8 on my laptop (and no, I am in no hurry to upgrade to CentOS 5).
I've started NetworkManager (as root) and started NetworkManagerInfo (both as myself and a 'dummy' user with a vanila GNome desktop), but NetworkManagerInfo complains that there are no network interfaces available. Where does NetworkManager/NetworkManagerInfo get information about available network interfaces? I know that *both* interfaces work just fine using the manual startup (eg ifup eth0 and ifup eth1). Is there a config file I need to mess with? If so, where is it?
I tried googling and could not find any difinitively usefull information (http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/nm.shtml has some information for FC5, but it is not totally helpful).