Wicd broken, cannot get to authorise on WPA

[NotExcessive]

I've installed KDE on my Gnome laptop (Acer 5745G) by pulling in kde-meta in Sulfur. WiFi wouldn't work, and I read somewhere that KDE didn't play nice with networkmanager, although Gnome had no problem. So I removed networkmanager and installed Wicd. Everything worked fine. Then I set KDE as the default session today, used the machine, shut it down (properly) and when I went back tonight, wireless was broken. I had rebooted the machine several times before, but nothing ever broke.... it was only after I had set it to default to a KDE session in the logon screen, that things fell apart. No other changes had been made.

I can't find networkmanager anywhere on the system, even though sulfur shows it as installed. It's not running anywhere (ps shows nothing) and it's not in the startup section of system settings. Attempting to remove networkmanager from sulfur, it wants to remove large chunks of KDE, so I'm not going there.

Firing up Wicd shows that it works fine with an ethernet cable, and scanning for networks shows the correct list with the correct SSIDs and signal strengths, etc. Attempting to connect shows it stuck at the validation stage, with the inevitable error message of connect failed: bad password.

I've deleted all the configuration from Wicd and reinstalled again, but no difference.

So....
1) How do I resolve the issue of networkmanager being still "in" sulfur even though it apparently doesn't exist on the system?
2) How do I get networking going again? Contine trying to repair Wicd, or am I better off trying to get the original networkmanager thing going? Have to admit networkmanager looked sexier on screen with more info but it never worked.

[micia]

Hi, does:
(as root)

Code: Select all

rc-update | grep NetworkManager


shows networkmanager?

If it does, remove it with:
(as root)

Code: Select all

rc-update del NetworkManager default


(if it is in the default runlevel)
and try to reboot.

[NotExcessive]

Damn that's annoying - I was searching for networkmanager, and it's in the system as NetworkManager! So I've removed that and added wicd to rc-update.

It's now up and running. Thanks for the prompt

By the way, any idea why NetworkManager never worked? When I first saw it I thought yeah, it also looks after 3G modems and the interface looked very slick, and that appealed to me.

[micia]

I have no idea about it, in my system it works fine, never had a problem (and in the past I was really no fan of NetworkManager ), which was your problem with NetworkManager?

[NotExcessive]

Network manager worked fine under Gnome, but with KDE, it just wouldn't connect at all - authorisation never went. Perhaps later tomorrow I might remove Wicd and put networkmanager back and see what happens. At least if I need to go back to Wicd again, I know the trap to avoid now.

[Fitzcarraldo]

My recent attempt to get Wicd to work with WPA in the SL 5.4 E17 spin failed utterly, and I got rid of it and used NetworkManager+nm-applet or ConnMan (although the latest version of ConnMan 0.67-r1 doesn't work for me any more so I'm back to using NetworkManager+nm-applet, which works flawlessly).

Code: Select all

$ su
Password:
# equo install NetworkManager nm-applet
# /etc/init.d/wicd stop
# rc-update del wicd default
# rc-update add NetworkManager default
# /etc/init.d/NetworkManager start
# exit
$ nm-applet &
$

If you have the SSID cloaked in your router, uncloak it then establish connection using nm-applet's GUI. Then you can cloak the SSID again if you want, although it's a waste of time if you are using WPA with a decent password (Re: Cannot connect to my wireless network.).

[Fitzcarraldo]

Moving this thread to Networking and Wireless shed (forum).