WICD: One of irritating problems of Linux: GONE!

Published on July 1, 2007 By XX In Personal Computing

I always liked using Linux, and many of its solutions and designs work very well for me.

That is, till there is any hint of WIRELESS. That word seems to be a bane word or what Krypton is to superman, for Linux. Wireless never worked well with Linux, and more or less all network managers manages wireless very badly. For example some network managers doesn't even support WPA.

I always got frustrated with wireless, sometimes almost to point of throwing laptop out of window. Yes, THAT frustrated... Anyway during one of my research I found out about wicd. It was pretty darned new, and surprising, unlike pretty much ALL network managers, actually are clean-looking and expert-friendly and works with any and all (including any protection scheme you care to add) protection systems, including WEP, WPA and many others.

The version 1.2.7 has a variety of odd problems, but that wasn't very surprising, not with its newness. I recommend you to use 1.3.0.

Steps to make it work, it worked for me. Skip all steps on ndiswrapper if your card is directly supported by Linux.

1: Remove any and ALL network managers. Download wicd and newest ndiswrapper ( or stable ). Install support software for those programs (but not those 2 programs themselves).

2: Reboot.

3: Install wicd and ndiswrapper, and ndiswrapper device driver.

4: Reboot.

5: Put in card and make sure your card works. modprobe ndiswrapper if needed to make it work. If it works, check dmesg for any errors related to ndiswrapper. If there are none, use ndiswrapper -ma to make it load on boot. Now, start /opt/wicd/tray.py, and create settings and connect to network. It should work. Don't forget to configure wicd for your setup, for example wlan0 and ndiswrapper. It may be different for your computer. Use iwconfig to find device name for card (typically wlan0 ). wext usually works, even if using ndiswrapper.

Steps to do if card works but it won't connect:

If using ndiswrapper, try using wext in configuration list. Worked for me.

Try static IP since sometimes dhcp just don't work.

Also, if using WEP or WPA, add quotes to your key. I definitely had to do that on my WPA configuration.

Comments

Gideon MacLeish

on Aug 26, 2007

Good article, XX. WHen you mentioned it on my Ubuntu article, you forgot to provide a link. I'm going to put that up there for you, ok?

on Aug 26, 2007

Oops! Thanks.

You're welcome!

*edit*
BTW the article is slightly out of date, use whatever stable version is out there now, they have fixed pretty much most unusual problems. So far it has worked very smoothly for me for months now.

Also, I have made one very minor error in what to do when don't work... WPA and WEP keys has either ASCII keys or hex keys... If your keys are ASCII ( easy to tell, if any characters past F are used, it's ASCII key. ) you have to add " " to your key, making something like this: "mysecretkeydontread".

MasonM

on Aug 26, 2007

on step 3 I assume you meant "Install wicd and ndiswrapper, and Windows device driver." as the Windows driver is required for ndiswrapper to work.

on Aug 26, 2007

Oh yeah. Yes.

Thanks.

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