Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

Bane · 2009-03-27 13:35:32

smlg wrote:

corenominal wrote:
Hi ggordon
Once Wicd is installed it can be started with the command, wicd-client. You should then be able to see the tray icon.
how do you do the command wicd-client? It does not seem to work.

Hi smlg

You can either hit alt+F2 (it's on the default conky) and type 'wicd-client' or, if you need the system tray icon at startup add 'wicd-client' to your autostart.sh (i think thats what its called - I'm not at my home 'puter at the mo). If you right-click on desktop & go down to preferences you will find it.

You will notice, however, as others have mentioned, that once configured you don't need the system tray icon running as wicd will look after your network in the background. Plus, it uses 20 odd meg of ram for just sitting there, so alt+F2 is probably your best bet, at least, that's what I now do.

Last edited by Bane (2009-03-27 13:42:43)

funky_uncle · 2009-04-21 13:30:20

I'm having wi-fi problems on my Eee as well, I suspect it's because of NM. The connection comes and goes, and sometimes it's just godawful slow (while my desktop PC, using the same connection, is OK). Anyway, I'm trying to replace NM with WICD using Synaptic, but I'm unable to download it becaus the connection is so bad.

So - is it possible to download wicd on my other PC and copy it onto a USB stick and install it from there?

Bane · 2009-04-21 15:25:21

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! smile

klanger · 2009-05-09 11:13:03

how to start network manager icon in tray?
i had wicd but after installing blueman (bluetooth app) it removed my wicd and installed nm... eh (can I run blueman and wicd?)

any idea?

"how to start network manager icon in tray?" - ok, google solved my 1st problem - nm-applet added to autostart.sh file big_smile

how about using blueman&wicd?

Last edited by klanger (2009-05-09 11:22:35)

venkmann · 2009-06-02 19:27:33

oupsemma wrote:

Wicd works very well on my CrunchBanged eeepc 701, in a better & easier way than nm-manager used to do.
The funny thing is the difference of sensitivity/sensitivity (pardon my English! ) : for the same wireless network n-m manager gives 91% reception, whereas wicd gives 67%. Which one is to be trusted?

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 wink
Canada

cmccullough · 2009-06-04 14:14:29

I've been using wicd with Puppy and it works very well. I prefer it over Network-Manager.

wolfizzi · 2009-06-15 06:43:39

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.

klanger · 2009-06-15 06:50:44

Well, if you want to use blueman (a bluetooth manager) you will have to say bye bye to wicd, as blueman requires network manager sad

murraythegoz · 2009-06-15 10:37:00

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.

Tuxfriend · 2009-06-15 18:52:56

On 9.04 i like the network manager, it handle 3 types of connection in my 901go. It can add 3g + lan or wlan+3g together in one tool. If we want to replace nm then we should have umtsmon and wicd.

rigosantana3 · 2009-06-16 01:19:48

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

achristoffersen · 2009-11-22 14:06:51

When I reboot I get two wicd icons in the tray? Any idea why that it is?

wicd-client only appears once in my autostart.sh?

Cheers

anonymous · 2009-11-22 14:34:27

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

achristoffersen · 2009-11-22 15:52:49

anonymous wrote:

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

yep - that did it... I find it strange that some people need to put wicd-client in their autostart - where as I don't... :confused:

Thanks anonymous!

rizzo · 2009-11-22 16:28:47

achristoffersen wrote:

I find it strange that some people need to put wicd-client in their autostart - where as I don't... :confused:

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

achristoffersen · 2009-11-22 16:39:10

Thank you for that explanation, omns :-)

pvsage · 2009-11-22 16:58:48

I don't know if the problem is in my Mini, my Broadcom card, WiCD, my home WiFi, or between keyboard and chair, but with WiCD installed I can't reconnect when waking from suspend. I might have to go back to the Gnome network manager.

Holi · 2009-11-26 23:41:18

Ok... Tried it out.. I'm using a linksys wrt110 (ralink chipset) and I've got a rebranded ralink rt2860 in my laptop... with network manager in ubuntu 9.10 I get 1.1MB/s from the next room with network manager in crunchbang 9.04.1 I get 30-40KB/s from the same location and with wicd I got 500KB/s until wifi broke (after 78 files or 298MB of data) on my router.. the router was really sluggish while accessing wireless options and when I checked the status of my connection it showed up as having lost all of it's wireless capabilities. rebooted the router. tried out some different configurations in wicd which resulted in my laptop completely freezing (couldn't even access the tty's) reboot and the problem persisted so I removed wicd (which got rid of the freeze up's) tried to reinstall network-manager from the repo on a ubuntu 9.10 disk (was worth a shot I thought) and now I can't even get a wired connection on my laptop anymore (or well.. I havn't tried manual configuration etc yet)

So far.. I'm not a happy camper when it comes to wicd sadly enough...

brummbaer · 2009-11-27 01:34:47

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.... sad seeing as you're posting about it, i'm guessing you probably got it figured out, anyways... hmm

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

Holi · 2009-11-28 14:46:32

Tbh I havn't done that yet smile I was planning to though after the weekend when I'm not busy drinking wink Made that post and this from my horrid wintendo roll

I first tried using ralink legacy drivers (seeing as how I have their silicon in both router and wifi card) unfortunately it didn't work at all... I've done some light googling of my issues but havn't found any extensive post about this problem... Think I'll search some more before totally writing wicd off (never exclude human error even if it might be your own). I had best luck with wext (that's the only one I got a connection with) and it was when I was fiddling with the others the freezing started.

But from my experience so far. nm in 9.10 by far works the best for me and the current nm's lack of performance is quite discouraging. Regarding the mess which is nm I can't say but I know my neighbour was pretty upset about static IP's in it when we were toying around with #! 8.10

*update*

Installed xfce 9.10 (what else to do when you wake up at 3 am and can't get back to sleep?). I'm currently updating it and I get rather inconsistent data from staggeringly low speeds up to about 55-100 KB/s. I looked it up and they use the same nm.. Oh well.. Perhaps wifi just is that inconsistent

Last edited by Holi (2009-11-30 16:20:41)

iNeedaNickname · 2012-01-08 05:49:58

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.

crunchworksyeay · 2012-01-19 15:57:07

iNeedaNickname wrote:

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,,,

I'm not sure if anyone here is aware of the fact that some need to use a DSL/PPP (point-to-point) connection to get online. The buggy nm failed me at that out of the box (#! r20111125). So while my vote goes to Wicd instead of nm, let's not forget that wicd doesn't have dsl/ppp features at all. So in case it's replaced you need to add pppoeconf or something to the mix too.

CrunchBang Linux

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#51 2009-03-27 13:35:32

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#52 2009-04-21 13:30:20

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#53 2009-04-21 15:25:21

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#54 2009-05-09 11:13:03

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#55 2009-06-02 19:27:33

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#56 2009-06-04 14:14:29

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#57 2009-06-15 06:43:39

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#58 2009-06-15 06:50:44

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#59 2009-06-15 10:37:00

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#60 2009-06-15 18:52:56

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#61 2009-06-16 01:19:48

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#62 2009-11-22 14:06:51

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#63 2009-11-22 14:34:27

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#64 2009-11-22 15:52:49

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#65 2009-11-22 16:28:47

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#66 2009-11-22 16:39:10

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#67 2009-11-22 16:58:48

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#68 2009-11-26 23:41:18

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#69 2009-11-27 01:34:47

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#70 2009-11-28 14:46:32

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#71 2012-01-08 05:49:58

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

#72 2012-01-19 15:57:07

Re: Wicd Network Manager instead of Network Manager

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