So, I recently was overcome with X11 desktop environment decision paralysis and uninstalled my perfectly functional xfce DE to try out Enlightenment. Which I must admit is pretty nifty. Here's the thing: I seem to have, in the process of uninstalling xfce and its related stuff, gone a little overboard and removed NetworkManager (I, foolishly, used Arch's pacman's recursive removal of packages). Which shouldn't be a big deal, I disabled security on my wireless and used ifconfig and dhcpcd to reestablish a connection.

Here's where it gets tricky - I can't get NetworkManager back up, nor can I get Connman/EConnman, the Enlightenment version, working either. I'm using wicd as a stopgap, but I generally connect through a VPN, which wicd doesn't support, and wicd is iffy with my university wireless as well. I don't know if it's the same problem stopping them both or different ones. And yes, I made sure to use systemctl to stop the daemons for dhcpcd, etc., and to only try to run one network daemon at a time.

Here's what goes wrong with NetworkManager: I can pull up a list of known networks, which it carried over just fine from my xfce/gnome keyring (and I made sure to start the gnome keyring daemon too). But when I try to connect to one (nmcli c up id [mywifi]), it freezes. No text output, or I'd provide that.

Connmann can get as far as noticing I have wifi, but if I try to connect, it says that no such service exists, even though I've started the daemon. Its command like too (connmanctl) doesn't seem to conform to its own documentation; I can't use "connmanctl technology" for instance, to detect what technology it sees.

So, I'd like to get one of these running. Any tips?

E17 is a new Window manager. The NetworkManager work with gnome. So you need to use command line to configure network.

Hm. Why don't you try wicd with e17? It has gtk-based applet.