Replacing Networkmanager

[chris_c]

wicd isn't 100% perfect - you'll have to give it a prod after enabling the wifi driver afaics but it still beats NetworkManager

Its slimmer not reliant on a bunch of gnome stuff...
it has a curses or cli gui as well as as a gtk gui!
It's a *lot* more configurable - yes you can do fixed address connections!

it will ask for your password each time you boot but that's fixable!

add a rule in /etc/sudoers.d like for the pandora's scripts

leave a root terminal open (sudo su) as and ruk with the sudo config will stop it working altogether and you
wont be able to fix it!

/etc/sudoers.d/20_wicd

%wheel All=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/wicd-gtk
%wheel All=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/wicd

you need to chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/20_wicd
as well

when you run the app the first time it will add itself to the session manager you need to disable this and add your own entry to execute a simple 1 line script

sudo /usr/bin/wicd-gtk

it might work by just adding sudo /usr/bin/wicd-gtk into the session manager but i ended up putting it in
Applications/Settings/lxsessions/LXDE/autostart (assuming you enjoy the speedier and lighter lxde over xfce!)

don't forget you will have to stop NetworkManager from auto starting too there’s a bunch of links in /etc/rcX.d to delete

you could replace it with a link to start wicd's deamon but the gtk thing will auto start the daemon if needed...

enjoy!

 

[chris_c]

nice surprise the the curses gui is *nice*

so if you ever need to kill slim and mess around with the console you can still wget....

dont bother with the version of urwid from the angstrom repo its for python 2.5 *sigh*

just grab easy_install

http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg#md5=bfa92100bd772d5a213eedd356d64086
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

make the egg executable and run it with sudo

then you can run

sudo easy_install -U urwid



btw don't let the console go idle too long - power save looses your connection to it!
so you cant chrt back to x
(I dare say a decent usb keyboard will let you ctrl-alt-f7 - how I wish the pandora keyboard could do that!)

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi,

I use wicd on my Debian 6.0 laptop with openbox WM, and it's indeed a really good network manager

I'll give it a try on the Pandora ASAP !

Bye and thanks, Magic Sam

 

[chris_c]

I've never been keen on NM - its hard to make it behave and theres a ton of dependencies
and the fact there are none X gui's for it make it a *big* plus!

 

[chris_c]

managed to get it to connect automatically when the wifi is enanbled - so now *very* happy with it !!!

also noticed that my wifi seems to be on wifi1 not wifi0 for some reason - not sure whats about!

/usr/pandora/op_wifi.sh

#!/bin/sh
#
# Released under the GPL

# This script simply toggles internal WiFi on or off.
cd /
if [ "`lsmod | grep wl1251`" ]
then
	notify-send -u normal "WLAN" "WLAN is being disabled..." -i /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/nm-no-connection.png
	ifconfig wlan0 down
	ifconfig wlan1 down
	rmmod board_omap3pandora_wifi wl1251_sdio wl1251
else
	notify-send -u normal "WLAN" "WLAN is being enabled..." -i /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/nm-device-wired.png
	/etc/init.d/wl1251-init start
	sleep 2
	wicd-cli -S -y
fi

 

[CPUnltd]

are you far enough along to drop a short howto, or is there still a bit more testing/figuring to do?

 

[jeffrey]

I've been waiting for this to happen

Will it start connecting to a network on boot?

 

[chris_c]

using the modified op_wifi.sh it will connect any "connect automatically" connections when the wifi is switched on, so if you configure wifi to start on boot then it should just work...

I've noticed sometimes it won't connect automatically but its not a biggie to do a refresh and click connect on those few occasions, if you have lots of problems you might try changing sleep 2 to sleep 4, and if running from boot might require it to add starting of the wicd daemon but I've not tested it, YMMV

No really instructions required its just a case of following their install instructions in the "source" distribution... see their downloads page for /etc/interfaces instructions too its really not a drama!

Oh and don't forget to disable NetworkManager !

 

[jeffrey]

urwid has a bit of C code which needs gcc for compiling. Did I skip a step in your instructions, or do I just need to get gcc?

 

[chris_c]

it does? you only need urwid for the cli so if you don't want that you don't need it!

Are you saying you don't have a compiler ? how do you fix stuff ?

see my other post for a better modification of the wifi script...

 

[chris_c]

holy crap they have some C code for string manipulations!!! Pythons way better for that, I done a whole app with a mate to resize and tile windows in *pure* python and that directly accesses xlib - the mind boggles!

 

[peelie]

can't seem to get it to install using easy_install, get this error message:

--
Searching for urwid
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/urwid/
Reading http://excess.org/urwid/
Best match: urwid 0.9.9.1
Downloading http://excess.org/urwid/urwid-0.9.9.1.tar.gz
Processing urwid-0.9.9.1.tar.gz
Running urwid-0.9.9.1/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-yx2zK8/urwid-0.9.9.1/egg-dist-tmp-AhM39e
unable to execute arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-gcc: No such file or directory
error: Setup script exited with error: command 'arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-gcc' failed with exit status 1
----

 

[chris_c]

damn didn't notice that dependence you need gcc installed too

 

[jeffrey]

damn didn't notice that dependence you need gcc installed too

Do you think there might be a reasonable workaround? I don't mind the idea of gcc on my pandora, but it opens the door to all kinds of stuff I'd rather not allow myself to do

 

[chris_c]

be brave! I can't think of a way to easily and reliably trackdown what files it installed on my machine and re-running the already compiled install will probably just cause a recompile anyway...

 

[CPUnltd]

this is where having a "backup install" on a 2GB SD card would come in handy... a clean install that you can duplicate your steps on and record them as you go... (food for thought... )

 

[jeffrey]

Unless I misinterpreted something, you never really explained how to install wicd. So I tried the following:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/wicd/wicd-stable/wicd-1.7.0/wicd-1.7.0.tar.bz2
tar xf wicd-1.7.0.tar.bz2
cd wicd-1.7.0
python setup.py configure
sudo python setup.py install

I'm unable to get the wicd daemon to start (or it starts but misbehaves, not sure). It just says "rename failed". After looking around, I get the impression that it's having trouble parsing the config file.

So I'm wondering if you installed wicd in a different way, which might explain why it works for you and not me. Else I guess I screwed something else up.

 

[chris_c]

Unless I misinterpreted something, you never really explained how to install wicd. So I tried the following:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/wicd/wicd-stable/wicd-1.7.0/wicd-1.7.0.tar.bz2
tar xf wicd-1.7.0.tar.bz2
cd wicd-1.7.0
python setup.py configure
sudo python setup.py install

I'm unable to get the wicd daemon to start (or it starts but misbehaves, not sure). It just says "rename failed". After looking around, I get the impression that it's having trouble parsing the config file.

So I'm wondering if you installed wicd in a different way, which might explain why it works for you and not me. Else I guess I screwed something else up.

the rename failed is just it failing to rename the process this is none critical and it still runs...
are you sure you have disabled NetworkManager
use wicf-gtk to run the configuration

 

[lomaxx]

I just found this thread, while searching for some other topic. Interesting. I might test wicd.

But I also wanted to mention this blog, which compares wicd and NetworkManager and points out that NM has some more features so far. I myself am rather new to wireless connections in Linux so i can't really verify what's the truth about it.
Anyway I tried cnetwork-manager, modified the source-code a little (so the WPA-Passphrase is not shown in 'ps ax'-output) and am running it fine in a crappy bash-script that starts xterm with "screen" running with cNM running, enter the passphrase and log out of screen to make it run in the background. If i start my script again then the screen-session is resumed and i can see if connection is still running or quit the connection by pressing CTRL+C.
This is maybe a bit unusual, but works nicely at least for wlan-connections (didn't do mobilebroadband so far) and also without X.

I didn't try setting up an automatic connection this way though and still you are right that NetworkManager has some flaws. So thanks for pointing out that wicd works.