NetworkManager Gets A New Text Interface

[carewolf]

It can only be better than the gnome interface. I have a dream, that one day, I will be able to refresh the wifi networks as I want, by a button or by F5.

Miss that in KDE as well, though double-clicking the disable wifi setting, thus restarting it, does trigger a rescan.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, having that will be nice. I had to use nmcli to set up wireless on a Gentoo netbook I maintain, and while it wasn't that difficult (ways easier than using wpa_supplicant directly), it still involved reading some man pages.

[Sonadow]

Man, finally. Setting up systems without a classical DE and NetworkManager (my XBMC HTPC is an example) has always been a PITA, and the available command line tools didn't always work perfectly.

systemctl disable NetworkManager.service

Then do what needs to be done with ip or iw (for wireless)

[Sonadow]

Yea, having that will be nice. I had to use nmcli to set up wireless on a Gentoo netbook I maintain, and while it wasn't that difficult (ways easier than using wpa_supplicant directly), it still involved reading some man pages.

I found the wpa_supplicant method easier and more straightforward though, since everything can be collapsed into 1 long command like so:

wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211 -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/<name of config file>.conf -dddd && dhclient -v wlan0

Only caveat is that NetworkManager must be disabled, otherwise it will intefere and conflict with wpa_supplicamt's attempt to get the wireless device authenticated with the access point.

[strcat]

I'm happy with netctl at the moment. It has a dead simple wifi-menu utility wrapping wpa_supplicant, iw and dhclient/dhcpcd. It opens up a console dialog with a list of available networks, and prompts for a passphrase as necessary. It generates a network profile for /etc/netctl and provides a service to automatically connect to them while roaming without the need for any interaction.

I do install NetworkManager + the standard GTK+ applet when setting up an installation for someone else though... so nicer command-line tooling is appreciated .

[Delgarde]

Seems to me every time I'd click on the network manager it would refresh the wifi connections. Could be wrong about that.

Could be hardware/driver dependent. I seem to recall that the scanning behaviour varies quite a bit between different devices...

[timofonic]

NetworkManager or Wicd?

I miss some functionalities in NM, like builin proxydriver-like functionality. Some wifi networks have awful manual proxies that need to be configured, and it's a pain in Linux because you need to disable them when you are on other network (obviously). Proxydriver theoretically solves this issue and has a way to configure the proxies per connection ID, but I wasn't able to configure it properly (lots of network problems) and I used a web browser extension (and I'm still training that computer user to not forget about that button at the top right, that needs to be changed... and it's a pain for a less computer skilled user)

Where's Freedesktop to solve this?