Over the weekend I setup a Ubuntu 8.04 installation in my apartment. The main purpose was to have a box to use to connect to my Tivo, but I am also going to use it to play with Java servlet and jsp development.
Of course none of this is any fun without Internet access. So I started configuring my Linksys pci wireless adapter. Turns out that the longstanding bug that affects the WPA2 passphrase store in Gnome Network Manager is still not fixed.
What happens is that you go in to Network Manager and configure your network, enter the SSID, and passphrase. Everything looks great right? But when you reboot the machine the connection doesn’t come back up.
And when you go look at the properties of the connection it doesn’t remember that you set it for WPA2 Personal instead of just WPA. You have to re-configure it two more times before it begins working again.
There are couple of ways to fix this
- hand code the wpa_supplicant files and set it all up manually
- use a replacement for Network Manager
I chose to use the second route, since I really didn’t feel like hand configuring the stuff. I must be getting lazy in my old age.
The replacement that I found recommended by several others is called Wicd. One of the nicest features is this “No Gnome dependencies (although it does require GTK), so it is easy to use in XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, Enlightenment, etc.”