KDE, Network Manager, & VPN WITHOUT Gnome
 

Recently my wireless connection began acting very different than it had before. About the only possibility I can trace it to was my fateful decision to try out Free BSD which only succeeded in screwing my partitions all to hell.

I got the GPT thing worked out and am back to normal, except for the fact that openconnect tries to configure my network from the ground up, instead of connecting to my work gateway.

Then, wicd started sending all my wireless modules into deep sleep every time I suspend to RAM, so I had to remove, modprobe, and rfkill unblock every damn time I suspend. It gets old quick.

So I installed Alien Bob's Network Manager and no problems with any of that crap after suspend. The only problem now is that I cacn't figure out how to connect to VPN without installing gnome libraries, but I thought Alien Bob's instructions said you should be able to.

Anyone know how to do it?

Slackware comes with openvpn.

If your VPN is compatible with openvpn then you can get up and running easily.

I added only the basic networkmanager support to my KDE packages.

If you want to go beyond that, you should install one of the additional networkmanager plugins, as found here: http://connie.slackware.com/~rworkma.../extra/source/ (packages to be found one level up)

You'll find plugins for OpenVPN, pptp (requires the pptp package), openconnect (requires the openconnect package as well), or Cisco vpnc.

Eric

Just to notice that every NetworkManager plugin can be build without GNOME support using the ./configure switch:

Then, we can have a complete NetworkManager stack without GNOME, just with KDE4 goodness. ;)

Is Older NetworkManager Compatible With The -0.9.2 Version?
 

Are those older packages built around NetworkManager-0.8.4.0, compatible with your newer NetworkManager-0.9.2 package?
I asked because once I installed your -0.9.2 package, NetworkManager ceased to work in Xfce and Mr. Workman's -0.8.4 package had to be re-installed, but, in turn, it doesn't work in KDE 4.8. If one tries to run NetworkManager-0.8.4 in KDE a warning comes up saying something to the effect that a newer version is required.

They likely will not work together. If you use NM 0.9 you will have to (re)compile the plugins against that version. It means indeed that Robby's XFCE packages for NM and mine for KDE are incompatible.

Eric

Since a solution was presented, (and thanks for that), this is solved.

However, personally I just downloaded a different version of vpnc-script, and everything's fine with wicd & openconnect.


I can't tell why.... or what was wrong with my other script to begin with.