Managing wireless connections seamlessly with wicd

Turning up a new Linux laptop for my mom, I had to do a bit of hunting for wireless "managers" that could handle connecting to the nearest Starbucks or McDonald's hotspot without doing much work.

Me, I just edit the /etc/network/interfaces file. But no, not something I want Mom to have to do.

I tried the wireless manager built into the Kcontrol system, it didn't work for me.

I tried Kwifimanager and kwlan, those didn't work.

wlassistant did work, and it seems to have much the same design goals as wicd. The interface is simplified as much as possible, connecting to a new essid will prompt for dhcp/wep settings.

I will certainly give wicd a try, even though it's not in the Debian Sid archives yet. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to integrate into a KDE environment. Not that Mom asked for KDE, only that I'm more accustomed to working within it.

wifi radar is nice too. http://wifi-radar.systemimager.org/

Ah! And that _is_ pre-packaged. I'll try that first.

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wicd/wicd_1.3.1-all.deb?mod...

Bob, a link to the .deb file from sourceforge. The link is actually in the article, but I copied out the link from sourceforge for you. Have fun.

I had found it already, thanks. Strange, but the sourceforge link required firefox, konqueror didn't bring up the mirror list. Hmmmm... Maybe too many apt-get upgrade's without restarting the KDE session. :^)

I'll try what is packaged in Debian first, just to make sure things are well integrated. If wifi-radar does something silly, like load all of GNOME, I'll stop it and go back to wicd first.

some versions of wifi-radar (1.8*) had trouble detecting my wifi interface on one of my laptops under the slackware derived zenwalk.

I had to edit the /etc/wifi-radar/wifi-radar.conf file by hand. Here's a link for slackware users if you want to do things the hard way: http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Networking/WiFi_...

radar require python, pygtk2 and the wireless tools. If you are using debian apt should take care of everything.

I've been using it on xfce so all of gnome is not required. wifi-radar is simple without too many extras, but it works for me.

Quoting:Here's a link for slackware users if you want to do things the hard way:

Hey, now, I resemble that comment! ;-)

gus,

it should be in the repositories for netpkg, but that link does show a complete manual install on slackware.

You should be able to install it the easy way on slack (netpkg) or the hard way.

choice

Well, wifi-radar worked perfectly, and quickly, the first time with the following caveat: The interface was "down" so what was reported was something to the effect, "interface eth2 incapable of scanning" which I know is false.

As soon as I configured the local essid, the interface was brought up and the rest of the neighbors APs were suddenly being successfully detected.

So I need to find the wibble to put in the /etc/network/interfaces file to bring the interface up but unconfigured.

wlassistant did that automatically, so that it reported the available essids up front. I'll let you know what wicd does when I get that working, hopefully later tonight.

I'm glad it worked out for you.

Its a nice simple interface.

Ok, I installed and tried wicd today.

I admit, it works quickly and well, and it is not at all difficult to configure. All the configuration options for the particular essid's are right up front and easy to find.

However, I think I prefer the wifi-radar interface. For some reason, the "details" like signal quality, encryption, channel, speed, were all in a grey nearly identical to the background colour in wicd, so it was very hard to read. Not that those details are required for an unsophisticated end-user, but it is information I want to be able to see and I couldn't see it.

So back to wifi-radar, and thanks to everyone for the suggestions. If wlassistant didn't have the DHCP timeout problems, I never would have looked beyond it.