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Wifi manager?


peter2
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I'm glad it works for you, and thanks for testing it with Mandriva! :)

Well, I'm still new to this, but as far as I can tell, it's working.

The only thing is that I'm having trouble either with my PCI cards or with the WLAN AP (it's a combination of ADSL modem and a wireless AP). The connection has started to act up again lately and I'm not sure what's causing the problems. It worked for a long time w/o any problems, but now it keeps dropping me all the time. I need to configure the network over and over again to get it to come up again.

 

I'm hoping that with wicd I can get more controls over the connection. But how can I tell if wicd is running? There's no icon in my system tray. If I say (as root) 'service wicd start', it doesn't give me any info. Just a new line in Konsole.

  [root@localhost dude67]#
		 [root@localhost dude67]# service wicd status
		 [root@localhost dude67]#

But when I want to make sure it's running I do this:

[root@localhost dude67]# service wicd start
		 Stopping any running daemons...
		 Starting wicd daemon...
		 /opt/wicd
		 wicd daemon: pid 14320
		 [root@localhost dude67]#

But, as I said, when it gets really bad, nothing else works than reconfiguring the network again (by RMB clicking the netapplet icon on my system tray) with the exact same parameters I'm running it always... I tried also ndiswrapper with Win drivers, but the same thing happened. By default I'm using madwifi.

 

In a terminal as root do
ln -s /opt/wicd/tray.py ~/.kde/Autostart/tray.py

if you want it in your tray at startup.

 

What wireless card do you have? Now that I know it works, I'll make an rpm. When Mandriva 2008 is released I'll install it with Xfce 4.4.1 on my laptop, and give wicd a try.

I hava a Planet wireless PCI card which uses Atheros chipset and should work with madwifi or ndiswrapper. I'm getting sick of this system when it keeps dropping me, but at the moment I don't have a choice but to work with WLAN.

 

This may be a little off-topic, but instead of wifi/wlan I may look into LAN that operates through regular electrical wiring. Something like this: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=533&sec=0

Does anyone have any experience with these gadgets in Mandriva (or any other linux system)?

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When I said I got wicd to work, well, perhaps I spoke too soon. It seems to crash easily; I've now crashed the system three times and had to make hard boot (turn off the power) to recover from the crash.

 

I'm trying to get some info about the crash, if anyone's interested. Where would be the best place to see what happened here?

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When it crashes do you still have a working keyboard, so you could open another terminal? Also is it crashing with both the madwifi and ndiswrapper modules? Have you created the symlink for the tray.py?

 

After you have started the wicd daemon and the gui.py, you can start the tray with

/opt/wicd/tray.py

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When it crashes do you still have a working keyboard, so you could open another terminal? Also is it crashing with both the madwifi and ndiswrapper modules? Have you created the symlink for the tray.py?

 

After you have started the wicd daemon and the gui.py, you can start the tray with

/opt/wicd/tray.py

When the system crashes it's not responding to anything! It does not respond to any keystroke nor to the mouse. My only option was to reboot with the reboot button in my PC (or pressing the power button for several seconds).

 

I have done what you instructed here earlier - no other symlinks or anything else.

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I've hacked out a quick rpm and installed it on my system (that has no wireless card) to see if the gui was causing the crash. It seems to be ok, I like the features. I've even placed it in my tray without any problems. It just keeps searching for a wireless card, that doesn't exist on that system. :rolleyes:

 

So I'm guessing the problem is with your wireless card's module/driver? Or perhaps a conflict with another network manager? You can check for errors in /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog, you may find something in those.

 

Anyway, I'll check this out more when 2008 is released and I try it on my laptop.

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I'll see what I can find in the messages. It's just that I'm not really sure what I'm looking for, but I will have a look and post back.

 

I guess I could be looking for the parts where the system has restarted and trace back from there...

Edited by dude67
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I guess I could be looking for the parts where the system has restarted and trace back from there...

Yes, and if you use less it will make it easier.

less /var/log/messages

and

less /var/log/syslog

While I've been testing/playing with this I've found that wicd has its own log in /opt/wicd/data/wicd.log, so you can also check that for errors.

 

Also I see that you are using WPA, so try the wext driver in preferences.

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I'm getting the logs from MCC and exporting them into kwrite for editing and easier search.

Can I also get the wicd log from MCC?

 

Better run it with debugging output:

urpmi strace

and then

strace -o /home/dude67/wicddebug "python /opt/wicd/tray.py"

The dump file ~wicddebug may get exhessively large, but it will contain ample information about your problem.

Edited by scarecrow
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and then

strace -o /home/dude67/wicddebug "python /opt/wicd/tray.py"

The dump file ~wicddebug may get exhessively large, but it will contain ample information about your problem.

OK, I've got strace already installed, but I get this:

[root@localhost dude67]# strace -o /home/dude67/wicddebug "python /opt/wicd/tray.py"
 strace: python /opt/wicd/tray.py: command not found

Is there something wrong with the /opt/wicd/tray.py file as it states something like "dapper" and "edgy". They suggest to have something to do with ubuntu. Anyway, this is how the file looks:

   #!/usr/bin/python
  import os,sys
  if __name__ == '__main__':
	   os.chdir(os.path.dirname(os.path.normpath(os.path.join(os.getcwd(),sys.argv[0]))))
  import gtk
  if gtk.gtk_version[0] >= 2 and gtk.gtk_version[1] >= 10:
	   import edgy
  else:
	   import dapper

I've gone through the (bloody long) system logs but haven't really figured out what the problem was. I did some hw changes and disabled the WLAN AP in the combined ADSL modem/WLAN AP and connected an extra Linksys WLAN AP into the modem by eth cable. It has been working for a week or so and has not dropped my connection once (knock on wood).

 

I started to use wicd again today, so we'll soon know if these problems will be over or if they continue.

 

I've therefore got a few questions:

 

1)

I still don't get wicd to start automatically, or it doesn't start properly as I always need to (re)start the service as I mentioned earlier

# service wicd start
								 Stopping any running daemons...
								 Starting wicd daemon...
								 /opt/wicd
								 wicd daemon: pid 20101
								 #

What's with that; perhaps I should add the /opt/wicd/gui.py to the Autostart also as I did with the tray.py?

2)

And this autostart of tray.py does not work either.

In a terminal as root do
ln -s /opt/wicd/tray.py ~/.kde/Autostart/tray.py

if you want it in your tray at startup.

If I type it (/opt/wicd/tray.py) in Konsole as root it works, but that leaves the Konsole open with root privileges. If I exit it, it will also exit the tray. Any ideas how to fix it?

 

Maybe it would autostart OK if the gui.py would start first (in autostart), eh?

 

I also took Greg's advice and use "wext" as my WPA Supplicant driver. Works so far...

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Is there something wrong with the /opt/wicd/tray.py file as it states something like "dapper" and "edgy". They suggest to have something to do with ubuntu.

A quote from the writer of wicd

Nothing in wicd is distro dependent, to my knowledge. I just named then edgy-tray.py and dapper-tray.py because when they were first released, those were the versions of Ubuntu they ran in. However, it isn't the version of Ubuntu that matters. edgy-tray.py required a certain version of pygtk to run, which Dapper didn't have, so that one I named edgy-tray. The one called dapper-tray.py can run in Dapper, which lacks the high enough version of gtk, although it has a few less features. Now, however, we have the ubiquitous tray.py, which will run anywhere, automatically selecting the correct version of the tray for you.
I still don't get wicd to start automatically, or it doesn't start properly as I always need to (re)start the service

I'm not sure why it doesn't start the wicd daemon on boot? As a temp fix/hack you could add the line

/etc/rc.d/init.d/wicd start

to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. Let me know if that works for you?

 

I will work on this more when I have it installed with Mandriva 2008 on my laptop.

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I'm not sure why it doesn't start the wicd daemon on boot? As a temp fix/hack you could add the line
/etc/rc.d/init.d/wicd start

to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. Let me know if that works for you?

Thanks Greg, I did that and will let you know if it works.

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