Until now I have been running my wireless machines in the Linux way. Or rather, with the oh so popular
CandyCane Linux tastes around, with Slackware. The traditional way encompasses:
- Set up the interface in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf
- Define the nitty gritty in /etc/rd.d/rc.wireless.conf
- Define encryption in /etc/wpa_supplicant
Und so weiter. It worked, although changing over to another access point took rather much work. You had to
compile your WPA keys out of the ESSID and the passphrase. Not too complicated, but too much work.
So I started looking around for something else. Luckily my friend FP mentioned, some weeks ago, that he had
good experiences with WICD:
- Wireless,/li>
- Interface
- Control
- Daemon
So I looked it up and found a TGZ package in the "extra" section of Slackware 12.2.
The procedure of installing wicd on Slackware is rather simple:
- Get yourself a copy of wicd-1.5.6-noarch-2.tgz
- Put it in the /root directory
- Start 'pkgtool'
- Install the wicd package
In essence, that's it. It is advisable to reboot your Linux box. The wireless devices will be available but
there may be some intricate problems... In my case, these were due to the old wireless system still running.
The symptoms I experienced were
- the wrong ethernet subsystem being selected
- inconsistent behaviour
- after some tweaking, the wireless system became stable
To cut a long story short: you need to disable the old wireless system.... Otherwise it interferes with wicd.
And since rc.wicd starts earlier that rc.wireless the latter may partially overwrite things that were managed
by wicd in the first place. So when I issued the command
root@Beryllium:/etc/rc.d# chmod -x rc.wireless
and rebooted (sure this ain't no Windows box? :o) ) the old devices were passified and wicd took control. YES.
now I can do things with the GUI and even in the CLI mode (i.e. on the command line) the wireless system is
running.
For the record: I am running currently with the WA3-50 access point. It beacons two ESSID's:
- Xenon (open system)
- Krypton (repeater mode of the [encrypted] Krypton AP)
Wicd sees Krypton and Xenon but not the repeated Krypton signal....
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