GUI wireless tools?

Chess Griffin chess at chessgriffin.com
Wed Jan 30 11:48:21 PST 2008


* 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

-- 
Chess Griffin
GPG Public Key:  0x0C7558C3
http://www.chessgriffin.com
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