For those running antiX Lysistrata.

I would like volunteers to try out a sidux app called ceni.
It is a 'replacement' for wicd. (I hope, not that I have anything against wicd, but ceni is tiny) and it is an ncurses app. It is supposed to be very good for wireless.
I have tried the wired part and it works ok, but need volunteers for the wireless.

This is what you would have to do.

1. Add the sidux repo to /etc/apt/sources.lst
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://sidux.com/debian/"
linktext was:"http://sidux.com/debian/"
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sid main contrib non-free firmware fix.main fix.contrib fix.non-free

2. apt-get update
DO NOT UPGRADE/DIST-UPGRADE!

3. apt-get install ceni
This will also install 2 python apps/libs. Very small about 300K in total.

4. Remove/comment out the sidux rep from your apt/sources.lst

5. Type ceni in a terminal, you'll be prompted for root.

6. Play around setting up wireless.

Please post here with feedback. Don't bother the devs at sidux.
This is experimental!

TIA

I am trying to apt-get update, but I keep getting errors (no public key). I will keep trying and report back when successful.

john

EDIT: I went ahead and installed ceni despite the warning. It took two tries to configure ceni properly and I'm not sure what worked as I made two changes on the second attempt: I'm pretty sure that changing to wpasupplicant did the trick (I also changed hotplug to auto on the"dhcp" screen).

Very easy to use - reminded me of old-school dos programs. I liked it a lot. Now the trick is this - will it work after rebooting (I've played around with wifi-radar in the past on this antix box and it didn't work as well as the default mepis tools so I hope this works better. I'll let you know tomorrow. And if ceni works on this notebook - atheros chipset - then I'll try ceni on my other laptop - broadcom chip).

The only other glitch is after the first unsuccessful attempt at configuring the device with ceni, the wterm prompt was placed in the middle of ceni's output so I had to shut wterm down and open it again for my second attempt. Peace.

Thanks for the feedback OU812.
I'm wondering if this could be a replacement for wicd. It is only a few kB whereas wicd plus dependencies pulls in about 20MB.

I rebooted and it worked fine. I still would like to do one more test - I noticed that my settings in mnetwork were not touched. So I wonder if mnetwork was responsible for starting the device at boot? I wonder if ceni's config overrode mnetwork's config ? I guess I'll delete all of my settings within mnetwork, reconfigure ceni, and see what happens. (The last time I was in this situation I was using wifi-radar from the repo and the device did not start after booting. I eventually removed wifi-radar and stuck with mnetwork. I hope things go better with ceni as it looks like a promising solution - with the exception of wifi-radar all similar apps seem to pull in a lot of dependencies.)

john

Appreciate your testing OU812.

You're welcome. Good news: I deleted all of my entries within mnetwork. Then I rebooted (notice that I did not run ceni at this point). To my pleasant surprise, I have a wireless connection! So ceni must be the default network app now. Very nice. Next I will test on my other notebook with the broadcom chip.

john

P.S. I browsed the first 10 pages so far at linux.softpedia.com and ceni seems to be the best solution so far. Good work, anti.

Well it worked.

I had the same issue as OU812 and the lack of the public key, but I already knew that was going to happen.

apt-get install ceni results in installing libcurses-ui-perl and ceni. resolvconf is recommended, but I did not install that.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/resolvconf"
linktext was:"http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/resolvconf"
====================================


Getting everything working was easy. However, ceni did not remember my connection preferences after a reboot** (not a big deal since I use my laptop on the go anyway). After I rebooted ceni had issues scanning for networks until I ran iwlist next to it at the same time then it got all the AP points. Despite this the values for the strength of the AP do not seem very accurate. The AP in the room next to me was given 48%, but at the same time iwlist gave it 90%. I'm not sure ceni can compare to the ease of use of wicd.

I would like to see how ceni handles multiple access points of the same essid. I would like to find out if ceni is more like wicd where wicd lists all the APs because it sees the different MAC addresses or if it is like Ubuntu that just connects you to the strongest AP of the same essid. I will try to find this out sometime soon.

The big question to answer is does it work with hidden essids and wpa2 at the same time? There is an option to check hidden essid, but I can't perform that test on my network since I share with roommates. I know wicd has issues with hidden essids and wpa2 from past experience.

I'll keep ceni for when I'm authenticating in a hidden essid environment (assuming this works) or when X fails, but for regular use I will stick with wicd for a few reasons: wicd remembers the wireless key, wicd seems more accurate on signal strength, and the most important reason... speed. wicd allows me to connect much faster by default. I have wicd in my menu and all I have to do is click, click wicd, and then click connect to the appropriate AP. I could probably enable suid on ceni and a few other things, but for now I will be leaving ceni as it is.

For now I will use wicd until it fails me then I will use ceni because it is the best command line based wireless manager I have ever used.

** I have wicd, the default mepis wireless, and ceni all installed at the same time. I did not run the others at all during my tests with ceni.

I've just tried ceni. Hardware: Core Duo centrino with Intel 3945ABG. I'm running Lysistrata on Debian Unstable. What i did before installing ceni was to remove wicd from my xfce autostarted list and also move the wicd start up script out of /etc/init.d. mnetwork wireless options are unconfigured on this laptop. I installed ceni (but not the suggested resolvconf) and rebooted while connected to my wired network (cos I forgot to pull the cable, doh!). Anyway I started ceni in the terminal and found it very easy. i reconfigured eth1 (intel 3945), scanned, it detected my wireless network, prompted me for the wpa key, accepted it and connected. I pulled the ethernet cable and confirmed that the wireless connectivity is fine. I have one reservation so far: speed, ceni was very slow to run. Anyhow i'll play with it a little more, see what happens when i reboot and so on. i won't have the chance to try to connect to hidden networks or to choose between different networks for a few days at least.

Just rebooted and my wireless settings were retained so i was connected on boot. This time I booted with the ethernet cable unplugged. I then connected it and ran ceni, which this time ran very fast, configured it for dhcp on wired interface and all is fine, both wired and wireless configured and connected as i like.

I have another laptop running Antix (again Lysistrata on Debian Sid with fluxbox+Xfce and wicd for wireless connectivity) which has intel ipw2200 (I think) so I'll take that next time I go to town (might be a few days) and try ceni at some public access points and post back.

I notice that ceni stores essids and keys in /etc/network/interfaces in plain text but sets that file to be readable only by root. Does anyone think this could cause problems or has any drawbacks?

some more thoughts about ceni: it has been extremely slow a couple of times now. More seriously I don't like the fact that it must be run as root. This is fine for a single user machine but means that it's completely unsuitable for a multi-user set-up unless you're happy to give your root password to other users (I'm not). I'm pretty ignorant about all things programming and scripting but wouldn't it be better if ceni could be modified to run with setuid root permissions, and maybe store the essids and wep keys somewhere other than /etc/network/interfaces?

Thanks to Urban and julian67 for the feedback.

As I don't have wireless, I have no idea whether ceni is a good choice or not. Remember antiX uses the Mepis network app too, so is ceni better/necessary? Is wicd the only REAL choice nowadays?

mnetwork is fine - except for the fact that it does not scan for networks (you have to do this at the cli). So far, the only app that does and doesn't have a heavy dependency list is wifi-radar. Ceni sounds good, but like wifi-radar, is buggy on some machines. Also, if it can only be run as root then it may not be the solution yet.

john

I think wicd is worth it for laptop users and for desktop users the mepis tool is fine. Another concern with ceni is that it writes to /etc/network/interfaces which is OK if you only use ceni and never want to switch back to mnetwork or use something like wicd but it's going to cause problems for those who try it and then try to switch to mnetwork and find it needs the default interfaces file which got changed. Wicd is nice in that it keeps its settings (including wpa keys readable by root only) out of the way (in /opt) where they don't affect anything else and none of your default network files are written to or have the permissions changed. You can kill the wicd daemon or uninstall wicd and immediately use any other tool you like because your default networking configs are just as they should be. ceni seems to have potential to be very useful but I'd be reluctant to do anything beyond test it at the moment. I have trouble picturing the situation where I'd prefer an ncurses app requiring root password to a tray icon with pop up gui. The only advantage would seem to be if you don't run any graphical interface, only shell.

It looks like ceni is a script. Linux does not like setting suid on scripts. I tried just in case since ceni is a perl script. perl did not like suid.

What can be done is to write a simple C program to be a wrapper for the script and set the wrapper program to have suid. Tweaking will be needed to pass command line options. I will add that later.

Code removed as it won't work thanks to some fancy perl scripting. Check later post.

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/testers-needed-especially-wireless-users-t496-15.html"
linktext was:"antix.freeforu ms.org/testers-nee ... 96-15.html"
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Now that I have realized ceni is just a script I decided to glance over it. I don't have enough time to examine the script throughly, but it does appear to be writing to /etc/network/interfaces like julian67 said. What worries me is that there is a warning at the top of interfaces file that the mepis network config does not like this file having extra entries if you are using the mepis config. So while wicd and ceni appear to be able to coexist it would appear ceni and the mepis tool should not. I will have to try the mepis config later to see what it does with this extra information in the interfaces file.

I believe the wicd daemon may be why my wireless is not working on reboot like julian67 and OU812. I will test this and the multiple APs with the same essid later.

Edit forgot a step.

If ceni doesn't fit well with antix, maybe we can get the tools from dsl or bfx. Here's a screenshot of the bfx tools:


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://bea.cabarel.com/uploads/images/bfx_pix/bfx7.jpg"
linktext was:"http://bea.cabarel.com/uploads/images/bfx_pix/bfx7.jpg"
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Both distros are debian based so their tools may integrate well with antix. I also know that tinyme was able to port some puppylinux tools to their distro, so maybe this idea is possible here.

john