I usually only connect to my wireless network at home so I usually have few problems with network-manager on Kde or Gnome. A couple of times however I have had the experience of needing to connect to an access point on the road and network manager just would not connect. I am usually able to use command line tools to connect so its been a problem I could live with however I want wireless to just work.
I rarely connect to access points that have security enable so I have often found this to be a strange problem.
I can’t recommend Ubuntu to my noob friends if they are going to encounter problems like this!
Also my laptop is very much in the twilight of its life and I find the requirements of network manager to be very taxing on the old girl. I was looking for something with a lower foot print. Since I use xfce I really wanted to get away from the Gnome and KDE dependencies as much as possible.
Things changed when I came across this neat little Gtk app called WICD which I think if you are able to you should give it a try.
Some of Wicd’s features include:
- No Gnome dependencies (although it does require GTK), so it is easy to use in XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, Enlightenment, etc.
- Ability to connect to wired and wireless networks
- Profiles for each wireless network and wired network
- Many encryption schemes, some of which include WEP/WPA/WPA2 (and you can add your own)
- Remains compatible with wireless-tools
- Tray icon showing network activity and signal strength
To install Wicd:
|—- Step 1 —|
Add the wicd repo to your sources.list. Replace mcedit with your text editor.
sudo mcedit /etc/apt/sources.list
add the following, (replace lenny with your distro)
deb http://apt.wicd.net lenny extras
Next in the console enter:
wget -q http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
|—- Step 2 —|
Caution: Important step!
Remove network-manager and its dependencies:
sudo apt-get remove network-manager
|—- Step 3 —|
Install wicd
sudo apt-get install wicd
To run wicd:
wicd-client
