Blue Knight Sojourn of the Mind

Well Gnome has Network Manager and it might work for some people but it did not work for me with WPA and Passphrases. So I started looking around at some of the other network managers and the one that looked pretty good was wicd. The home page for it is here. Now the reasons why I liked it, it looks just like every other Network Manager. But when you really dive deep in to the web site you find out that it is totally customizable, and they have an IRC channel, which means that if I run in to some problems (and I did) I can maybe find some time when the developers hang out.

Wicd is in portage but it is masked, but still as long as it is in portage it means that at least you can unmask it and use it.

I installed it by unmasking the package and it came up just find after following the process. It worked great with my Ethernet controller but had some problems with my wireless. That is when the IRC channel came in real handy.

After speaking to the developers on the IRC channel my problem was solved very simply. It looks like the software in this version (1.5) works with WPA and Hex keys. What I needed was WPA and a passphrase, and after talking to the developers I was presented with a real easy fix. Create another profile to do exactly what I need. This is accomplished as follows:

Add another template to /etc/wicd/encryption/templates. I called mine wpa-psk, although it probably should be called wpa-passphrase. The actual template looked like this:

name = WPA with PSK
author = BlueKnight
version = 1
require apsk *PSK
—–
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid=”$_ESSID”
psk=”$_APSK”
priority=5
}

Pretty simple isn’t it. Then after it was done I needed to add it to the list of profiles as active. For this to happen just add the name of the file to “active”. Then after the restart of the process and connection via the client I was able to easily log in and use passphrase with Passphrases.

Now this was done with the help of the developers so they will be adding this in some way to the next version (don’t you love IRC?).

Now I have a wonderful and intuitive network manager!