GUI wireless tools?

[martinko]

Chess Griffin wrote:
> * Scott I. Remick <scott at sremick.net> [2008-01-30 19:29:07]:
> 
>> One thing that has jumped out at me is the apparently lack of a GUI 
>> utility for discovery of and easy-connecting to wireless access points. 
>> Am I missing something? Other than Network Settings, which requires you 
>> to manually enter a known SSID and so on. What do other people use? 
>> Preferably GUI, because while I don't fear the CLI part of the point of 
>> this laptop will be to "show it off", so eye-candy counts. Support of WEP 
>> and WPA necessary.
>>
> 
> For now, I just use command line tools.
> 
> However, maybe there is something on the horizon.  There is a really
> nice Python based GUI application for managing wired and wireless
> networks called 'Wicd' (http://wicd.sourceforge.net).  It supports
> WEP, WPA, and most other things you'd expect.  It is similar to the
> GNOME Network Manager found on Linux, but much better in many ways.
> It is basically a GUI front end to standard command line tools to
> manage networks.  It works very well in Linux and I have tested it on
> Slackware and Arch Linux.
> 
> The bad news is that currently there are lots of Linuxisms in this
> application.  It calls the Linux command line tools and options that
> are not the same as in FreeBSD.  It also installs in /opt.  :/
> 
> Anyway, I contacted the developer several months ago and asked him
> whether he'd be open to making his application more OS agnositc and he
> was very interested and willing.  He said the current SVN version,
> which I have not tried, makes major changes to how the application is
> configured and used, and seemed to indicate that one would be able to
> manually choose which CLI Wicd uses, as well as where it gets
> installed.  In short, he seemed like he would like to make his
> application work on FreeBSD.  I offered to help test/debug and write
> patches where I can (my Python skills are not that strong, though) and
> he said he'd get back in touch with me once development on his next
> stable branch occurs.  
> 
> So, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  I think this application has lots
> of promise.
> 
> Chess
> 

The application seems very promising.  Please keep in touch with its 
development and please inform us about its progress.  Thanks!

M.