Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager (Page 3 of 3)

Yep, just look for the latest wicd .deb file.  Copy it to a folder, double-click and your packet manager should install it for you, providing dependencies are met - with default #! install, they are.  Remove nm and # out nm in your autostart.sh & your off!

I am a retired technician from decades at IBM Canada who has taken to travel in old age. When I move about it is always with a stack of Linux LiveCD's and my Toshiba Satellite P300 (Intel WiFi Link 4965AGN). Wireless connectivity is crucial and I can say of the 6 or so different wireless auto-detection and connection programs 'wicd' rates near the bottom. In a nice B&B I recently stayed in for two weeks, my room was 35 feet and two walls from the wirless router/broadcaster. As I slowly went trhrough a disk or two each evening, the distros sporting wicd were unable to detect this network let alone neighbouring ones. Blue-White Linux came the closet of the wicd users and would see and connect to the network if I moved my laptop into the same room as the wireless router. Other distros using other wirless network apps not only found the in-house wifi network but others in the neighbourhood as well.
For me and my travelling needs - or indeed at home a fair distance from your broadcasting router - wicd proved worthless in the situations described above while the wireless network managers of the following distributions are powerful and very easy to use direct (ethernet) or wirelessly:
Fedora 10 (bullet proof)
Ubuntu 8.10 bullet prooof)
Pardus 2008.2 (strange non-GUI but few required inputs result in immediate connection)
Crunchbang (a few minor quircks)
PCLinux OS (bullet proof)
PC/OS 2009 v2 (bullet proof)
Sabayon 4.0 (bullet proof)
GoblinX 1.7 (wierd setup but immediate and reliable connections)
Lin-X 2.2.0 (bulletproof)
Mepis 8.0.06 (a little quircky in setup though)
Simplis/Vixta 2009 (bulletproof)
ZevenOS 1.1 (bulletproof)
Mandriva 2009 (a stinker to set up wirelessly when installed, but it does well live. Go figure...)

All of the above performed from well to very well and connected effortlessly at 35 feet and two walls away from the broadcasting router. Their ability to find all wireless networks in the neighbourhood was also amazing - some finding a low of 22 while others finding as many as 38. As you can see many of the above are Ubuntu deriviatives. I believe none of the above used 'wicd' as the network finder/manager. The worst performers in the tests for my simple needs were those using either 'wicd' or 'kwifi' - both could'nt find a wireless network if they were trapped in a phone booth with it. Terrible in my observations.

Not being an expert in the whys and wherefores only the results, perhaps certain distros muck things up with good wireless apps but it is my contention that there are good, bad, and ugly wireless network auto-detection and connection managers in the Linux world.

Again, I tested 34 distros over three days in this specific area so chances are I tested the majority of distros commonly available. If your needs are similar to mine the above distros' wireless network applications are to be recommended. It would be wise of any group who is considering bringing or changing wireless to their distro to pay attention to the abbove findings and dig deep into these distros to see how they suceeded where so may others failed.
Cheers,
drvenkamnn
Canada

I've used nm, wicd and kwifi over the years, and I find wicd to be the most consistent at "just working" to get wifi connections.  Recently, for some reason, updates on all the computers my family members use caused nm to fail.  As described in some previous posts, nm refused to hold the key info to connect to my home network.  My wife's computer and my son's computer have Linux Mint, another computer runs Ubuntu, and my laptop runs #!.  All four quit working, so at first I suspected the router.  Then I noticed that my daughter's computer, running Dream Linux with wicd was having no problems.  I switched all my family computers to wicd, and it fixed the problem.

I'm not sure why Venkmann has had problems with signal strength using wicd, as I have noticed the opposite.  OMNS has also suggested that he gets better signal strength with wicd.  It doesn't matter to me which networking tool goes into the distro, but while nm keeps being buggy, I'll replace it with wicd on my computers.

I like NM integration.

I use 3G connections (via USB key), wireless, wired, and vpn (cisco and PPTP), and making them available with different tools (although well suited, such as umtsmon, kvpnc, and wicd itself), have been always a pain, expecially when you don't have any other connection than 3G, and you don't have all your nifty hacks to have at least the primary connection works.

NM is far from being perfect, and it tends to kidnap all your interfaces, but it's there OOTB, and it work well enough (for me, at least).

my two cents.

m.

setting up a wireless connection in crunchbang is a pain in the [censored] to say the least.
this may prove usefull........

Try commenting out the wicd-client and see if you still get two icons.

That used to be the case but the client now starts with the daemon itself during boot-up.

hi Holi, sorry about your grief w/ wicd. i've not got much to recommend w/ regards to the freeze-ups, but i actually went through the same thing where i'd mussed about with switching back and forth, not realizing that installing wicd auto-removed nm, and then removing wicd left me sans network manager, so no network connection whatsoever. i had to use the laptop to download the wicd deb file from packages.ubuntu.com, and install from usb with dpkg.... seeing as you're posting about it, i'm guessing you probably got it figured out, anyways...

as far as the signal strength discrepancies between nm and wicd, one of the things i like about wicd is the option to select the wpa supplicant driver that works best with your card (wext works best for my belkin usb wlan nic), so if anybody's having difficulties getting good signal strength from wicd, try playing around with that option under preferences from the main configuration window.

as far as making wicd the default for #!, i personally prefer wicd, but it's so easy to install that it's kind of a non-issue. for the distro, since crunchbang seems to be particularly popular in the netbook market, it makes more sense to provide a default network manager capable of the broadest range of connection modes, particularly 3G, which i guess tilts my opinion toward nm for #! default, though i personally have no use for it.

+1 nm

With #! 10 nm works fine even though it is slow at connecting, speed is ok.
Then I began my path to debian testing upgrades. nm stopped working so I went through all kinds of stuff and managed to get nm working again but very buggy so I tried wicd which worked great and connects fast. I also tried commandline stuff which is the fastest but to much hassle for me due to my poor knowledge :-D

I am gonna guess that nm is targeting gnome and might not be the best option for non-Gnome in the future although I have not checked what goals there are for nm.

Btw, I am mostly using i3 wm now and wicd was much easier to get going then nm IMHO although I only tried nm a little bit in openbox while it wasn't working. Oh yeah, when I got nm going in i3 i got that huge gnome notification :-D Well its gone now.