Just posting for the benefit of laptop users who need something more flexible than the standard Mepis tools and find wi-fi radar inadequate/ineffective and also have no desire to install network-manager or spend time in the terminal when they should already be connected and working.


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url was:"http://wicd.sourceforge.net/"
linktext was:"wicd"
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is an excellent gui tool that enables you to easily connect to all kinds of wireless networks, Open, WEP, WPA etc.

Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings.

Some of Wicd's features include:

1. No Gnome dependencies, so it is easy to use in XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, Enlightenment, etc.
2. Ability to connect to wired and wireless networks
3. Profiles for each wireless network and wired network
4. Many encryption schemes, some of which include WEP/WPA/WPA2
5. Remains compatible with wireless-tools
6. Tray icon showing network activity and signal strength

Actually the .deb package available from the wicd site does have some gnome dependencies (python-gnome2-extras for example) but the overhead is tiny. You could compile it from source and perhaps have no Gnome dependencies at all. Wicd is easy to configure, stores profiles and keys without needing to store them in a keyring, can be set to connect to networks automatically (or not) and will handle your wired connection too. It runs as a daemon and also has a tray icon, if desired, which sits happily in the slit/tray on fluxbox. It works nicely in any Desktop Environment and you'll never again need to resort to the command line to scan, list, or connect to, a wireless network. I'm running the latest Antix upgraded to Debian unstable on my Centrino laptop and wicd makes life easy in both fluxbox and Xfce. As long as your wireless adapter functions in Linux then wicd will use it to give you a much better experience than anything available in Windows. Like the iwlist scan command it will show you all available networks, even hidden ones, and tell you which are encrypted and how.

Wi-fi radar must be uninstalled before installing wicd but there are no other issues. It's recently become the default network manager for Zenwalk 5.0 (a user friendly version of Slackware) and has worked flawlessly for me on various distros, live and installed, based on Debian and Slackware. Desktop users who use a wired connection and/or a single wireless network will have no need of anything beyond the excellent Mepis network assistant but anyone who routinely connects to different wireless networks might find wicd to be a 1st class solution.