On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> which alternative to NetworkManager do you suggest ?
>
> For mobile systems (eg. notebooks) I really like the idea of
> automatic network setup, but NM is really a pain in the ass, so I'll
> have to decide whether trying to fix it or pick something else.

I would suggest wifiradar, if it's still maintained and you aren't
looking for dialer/ethernet support. When I used it in the past it
seemed to work well.

Locally, I now use wpanet (https://github.com/idunham/wpanet), which
I wrote after getting annoyed because /etc/init.d/networking is
blocking, wicd occasionally worked poorly with my drivers (did you
know that if you start a dhcp client at just the wrong moment during
association of a madwifi-supported wireless card, it will cause a
kernel panic?), busybox ifup didn't support wireless networking, and
so on.
While there is a basic configuration script included in that and it
sets up my wireless properly, I would not recommend it yet unless the
user is a geek who knows about or wants to learn about raw
wpa_supplicant. I made it public mostly because I keep finding network
scripts that seem to be something along the lines of:

#connect to network we stored in 1234567890abcdef.conf
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c /var/${DAEMON_CONF}/1234567890abcdef.conf -B
# wait for it to connect, then start the dhcp client
sleep 3
dhclient wlan0

and I wanted to have a public example of how to use wpa_cli -a.

(TL;DR: In my experience, every network manager does *something*
wrong, and it always seemed to cause trouble for me. So I wrote
my own.)

HTH,
Isaac Dunham