Network managers in Ubuntu: wicd

Posted: July 11th, 2010 | Author: Tobias

The network management from console is pretty miserable, and until I can figure out a better method I would rather use the GUI version. In this case, I am trying to get away from Gnome, which uses vast amounts of memory, but maintain the funcionality of Gnomes scripts/interface.

One promising bit of software is Wicd, built to not need any particular window manager, just what I like. (My mouse just died!)

The instructions I did not follow, but which are the right ones, are these. Extracted from their website:

Wicd is included in Debian Sid, so you can just use apt-get install to get it.

You can also use the apt repository. Just add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://apt.wicd.net lenny extras

where lenny is your version of Debian in lowercase (lenny, sid). You’ll also need to add the key used for signing Wicd by running the following command in a terminal:

wget -q http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Now you can apt-get update and apt-get install wicd to install Wicd. If you are using Lenny and you use Madwifi, make sure to use wext in Wicd.