evad.zone

Wicd is an application that manages wired and wireless connections in nice and easy manner. You might say that NetworkManager already does that and is enabled by default, but wicd has several important advantages over NM. Here are few:

• It just works. Really.
• Wicd works in the background as a daemon that connects to the network as soon as system starts up, not only after logging into user’s desktop. (You’ll consider that as a HUGE advantage if for some reason X server won’t start one day and you’d end up stuck in text-mode only, desperately looking for solutions.)
• It doesn’t ask you for a keyring/WEP/WPA passwords over and over. You type it into connection profile only once and forever.
• Allows you to define static IP/DNS configuration without a hassle.
• Did I mention wicd just works?

However, wicd has been designed in Ubuntu users in mind, and installing it in Fedora might be a little pain. Fortunately, there is no need for manual compilation (python power!), and Fedora installation is quite nicely documented in wicd’s wiki. It’s still quite a lot of handwork in command line, tough.

Lazy (almost) RPM solution

I’ve googled around and found the latest wicd 1.4.2 (as of writing this post) packed into single RPM file. It works, but I’ve noticed initscript included in that RPM is not quite Fedora-friendly, hence wicd doesn’t run as a service (which means – doesn’t work at all). To fix this, we need to change /etc/init.d/wicd file:

#! /bin/sh
#
# /etc/init.d/wicd
#
# chkconfig: - 98 02
# description: Wicd is a wireless and wired network manager for Linux.

# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

case "$1" in
        start)
                echo -n "Starting wicd services: "
                daemon /opt/wicd/daemon.py 2> /dev/null
                touch /var/lock/subsys/wicd
        ;;
        stop)
                echo -n "Shutting down wicd services: "
                killall daemon.py 2> /dev/null
                rm -f /var/lock/subsys/wicd
        ;;
        status)
                if pidofproc daemon.py > /dev/null ; then
                        echo "wicd is running."
                else
                        status wicd
                fi
        ;;
        restart | reload)
                $0 stop
                $0 start
        ;;
        *)
                echo "Usage: wicd {start|stop|status|reload|restart}"
                exit 1
        ;;
esac

Do not forget to make it executable with chmod a+x /etc/init.d/wicd. It might be possible that wicd would still not run and crash complaining (when executed from terminal) something about D-BUS undefined objects etc. I’ve had that issue and figured out that /etc/dbus-1/system.d/wicd.conf file should look more or less like this:

<!-- This configuration file specifies the required security policies
     for connection-manager to work. -->

<!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
<busconfig>

  <!-- ../system.conf have denied everything, so we just punch some holes -->

    <policy context="default">
        <allow own="org.wicd.daemon"/>
        <allow send_destination="org.wicd.daemon"/>
        <allow send_interface="org.wicd.daemon"/>
        <allow receive_sender="org.wicd.daemon"/>
    </policy>

</busconfig>

Accessing GUI and tray icon

Wicd should be accessible through Applications -> Internet -> Wicd, however it is also possible to make an icon to appear in tray area by executing /opt/wicd/tray.py, and ideally inserting it into desktop session startup scripts (System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Sessions).

OK, but what is actually wrong about NetworkManager?

I’ve really wanted to get a true fan of NetworkManager lately. After being completely useless in previous Fedora releases, NM managed to impress me after installing Fedora 9 on my laptop. It actually worked! To be fair, I must admit it gained quite a lot of improvements for F9 release and is now in pretty usable state. However, the new and most interesting NM feature for me – support for GPRS/3G connections – turned out to be buggy and not functional at all. I’ve even reported it in bugzilla, but no one seems to be bothered. Other than that, I really hate the idea of being asked for a password each time something fails, also being completely offline once logged out from desktop is just wrong. So, at least for now, I won’t be a true fan of NM and continue using and recommending wicd.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 9:49 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.