This is just a question of curiosity, really; I'm seeing a behavior which to me doesn't make a lot of sense, so I'm assuming that I lack some crucial piece of information for understanding.

I am running Slackware 13.37 on my work machine. For whatever reason, the wicd GUI experiences a timeout when trying to obtain a DHCP lease over my wired connection at the office. The odd part is, invoking dhcpcd from the command line gets a lease every time, without issue.

At home, or on any other network I've encountered with this machine, wicd will pull a DHCP lease just fine, over the wired interface or wifi.

Are the timeouts different? I've always thought that both methods were essentially the same. I would have even guessed that wicd was invoking dhcpcd, but I suppose that it isn't, or it is doing so with a different set of options than the defaults. There doesn't seem to be an option to adjust the timeout length in wicd. Of course, you can with dhcpcd, but the default in this case seems to work just fine.

Invoking dhcpcd from the command line is actually faster than bringing up the wicd GUI anyway, so this isn't really a problem, but I wouldn't mind knowing what the difference between the two is, if anybody can shed light on it.

Seems to be a known bug:
http://wicd.sourceforge.net/moinmoin/FAQ

wicd doesn't get the address, it depends on the default program dhclient to get it. dhcpd is a DHCP server which can be used as a client.
Weirdly, ISC (the authors of dhcpd) suggest that if you can't get an address with dhcpd, then use dhclient.

Thanks for the reply!

I was actually talking about dhcpcd, the DHCP Client Deamon, and not dhcpd or dhclient.

Nonetheless, the fact that you point out that wicd uses dhclient makes this slightly more strange, because when I invoke dhclient directly from the CLI, it too is able to obtain a lease, whereas wicd is not.

Hmmmm .... There is clearly still something that I don't get. Oh, well.

Whoops. Missed that.In that case maybe dhclient is not your default dhcp client, because the wicd site says it uses the default. Also, check the order that services are started to make sure that it makes sense.