I thought it would be interesting to remember how many wifi clients I used over the last year or so:
- network manager from KDE3: I used this one for a long time. Even after starting using KDE4 (in those scary days of betas of the 4.0.x branch, where virtually nothing worked as expected), this rock-solid tool kept me connected to my wireless network. Its biggest problem was just that it was slated to die; it had the KDE3 look, and would be vanished soon. (Image from softpedia)
At some point, a plasmoid appeared as a replacement. This one was a nightmare at the beginning, but after some time it started to work. It never worked 100%, there where some inconsistencies (when editing networks' properties, or when showing the current state, some things did not reflect correct status). It worked for some time. (Image taken from here)
Just a couple of months ago (from KDE 4.3 betas?) the plasma applet changed is icon to something really ugly, and a tooltip message said that its development was incomplete and suggested to use "knetworkmanager" instead. So I moved... and well, this one worked nicely! I thought it was the end of the journey. Well integrated in KDE4, properties appearing in control panel too... some tiny features where appearing from time to time after upgrades. Very nice.
Sadly, after yesterday's update, it did not connect anymore. I can click the network names I created, and nothing happens. Just that. I don't know how to debug it.
- I should also mention that when these things fail, I also resort to wpa_supplicant, connecting from command line with a config file I already have pre-configured and a command line saved right there as I always, always forget the parameters. But again, this is working 100%. It keeps disconnecting, it shows a lot of errors in the console... It kind of works, and saved me sometimes. Last night it was not the exception, so I did not want to continue using it for work over weeks until finding a solution.
Looking for solutions last night I found wicd. I just thought 'yet another program to try'... and worse, it depended on gnome libraries so it looked like some gnome-only applet. But comments were very positive, so I tried it. Installing the package also uninstalled knetworkmanager, good job! The package also added a daemon, perfect.... and all I can say is it just works. Ok, the UI is not KDE4-ish. But I can configure everything I need, and it worked perfectly after a couple of reboots. (As a side comment: Ubuntu's repositories had a 1.5.x version, and after installing it and knowing it worked, I moved to wicd's repos which brought 1.6.2 version, which is even nicer).
My intention is to let others know wicd, and to receive feedback about these things, like: Am I too dumb, that I break my networking so often? Is this regular fight intended for every end user that just intends to keep his ubuntu updated? (I know I play beyond end-user-ness, and I enjoy it, but I also think ubuntu must be something an end user must be able to manage by itself).
Meanwhile... I will happily use wicd -- as long as it works :)
