Slackware and wireless: general question
 

Hi,

I just migrated my laptop to Slackware 13.37, and I have a general question about handling wireless.

My main desktop is KDE. What tool can you recommend for handling wireless networks in a more or less transparent manner? Meaning I have only to select the network's SSID (graphically) and then fill in the corresponding password (be it WEP, WPA or whatever encryption is used).

As far as I understand, there's Wicd and NetworkManager (from SBo). What do you recommend?

wicd does the job fine. Having said that, I haven't tried NetworkManager.

I also vote for wicd, it is in /extra. I have used it on my netbook and it works great. Sometimes, however, it fails to connect and I have to run some commands myself to fix it. Still, it's better than doing it by hand every time.

For me WICD didn't work even with the correct configurations, so I used NetworkManager and that worked right after downloading it. :/ Not quite sure why, and I feel insecure because of it but it seems to be running okay.

Wicd should work out of the box for most situations, unless you have something set from the defaults. Unless your wireless card requires a special firmware to be loaded any network manager should work without incident.

I used wicd very happily for the last couple/few releases, but I recently installed NetworkManager (via sbopkg/slackbuilds.org) and I'm very impressed. It is much faster to recognize and connect to different networks. Sometimes wicd would not automatically connect to known networks. NetworkManager seems to always do so. Also, wicd seems to have stopped being developed, so there's a good chance that it will be replaced anyway in the future.

Why do you say so? The Wiki says, the last stable release was 4 months ago. I am not trying to rock your boat: I just sold wicd to a friend of mine, and I would certainly switch her to Network Manager if what you say is true. Being a KDE user, I personally don't care.

I just use wpa_gui - not willing to install all the dependencies for Network Manager and wicd is a bit/miss on my machines whether it works or not...

Thanks for the numerous answers and hints. I installed Wicd from extra/, removed all the network info from rc.inet.conf, rebooted and... works like a charm. It also integrates nice into KDE, since all the GTK apps default to oxygen-gtk. :cool:

https://launchpad.net/wicd/+announcement/6738

I don't know if things have changed since.

Brian

This thread revisited, one month later. I installed Slackware 13.37 on a few laptops and experimented some more. On some machines, curiously, Wicd was unable to maintain a stable connection. So I finally gave NetworkManager a spin and installed the relevant packages (NetworkManager, network-manager-applet and ModemManager) from SBo. I edited rc.M to start it upon boot, and hey: NetworkManager is just perfect. Plus, it integrates nice into my KDE desktop (sporting oxygen-gtk).

From another thread