Wicd

From MEPIS Documentation Wiki

1 Introduction
2 Installation
3 Tray icon
4 Tips and tricks
5 Links

Introduction

Wicd is a new wireless front-end that looks very promising. It is especially strong for dealing with problems with WPA. The installation will stop and remove Knetworkmanager and probably any other wireless frontend you have installed, so your connection will drop away.

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Installation

First, add one of the following lines to your repo list:

for MEPIS 6.5

 deb http://wicd.longren.org dapper extras

for MEPIS 7

 deb http://apt.wicd.net debian extras

Do a reload in Synaptic and install the packages wicd and python-gnome2-extras. A number of dependencies will be pulled in. Knetworkmanager will and should be removed during installation, and your wireless connection will stop if it is set to Automatic. Go into the Network Assistant and set network configuration to manual. In the wireless tab, set ESSID to your local network name or "any". The installation should create a menu entry for the connection manager in the Internet menu. If it doesn't, you can create it manually. The application is /opt/wicd/gui.py.

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Tray icon

Short method
You can also add the Wicd icon to the tray by simply following the usual manner. It seems to work just as well.

Long method
IF the short method does not work, get a wicd update here. This update fixes issues with the tray icon. Open Konqueror as root (menu > system > file system > File Manager Super User), open the folder where you saved the file, right click, and extract to a new folder. Navigate to that folder and then move all contents to /opt/wicd. Still as Super User, navigate to /opt/wicd/data. Open the file manager-settings.conf and change everything that says False to 0 (zero). Close konqueror as super user. Open konqueror (normal user) and go to /home/YourAccount/.kde/Autostart. Right click in the folder and choose Create New > link to application Fill in:

General: Wicd tray icon

Application name: Wicd tray

Command: /opt/wicd/tray.py

Save and exit. After rebooting and logging in, you ought to have the wicd tray icon in the systray. Clicking it opens the connection manager. The rest of the interface is pretty self-explanatory.

NOTE: see also link below to KDE Autostart file.

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