On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 11:49:11PM +0200, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 23/07/2015 22:19, Isaac Dunham a écrit :
> >On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:12:36PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> >
> >>>
> >>>For those of you who don't want dbus, my experience tells me that
> >>>getting rid of it would involve something like the following:
> >>>
> >>>* Use something like fvwm, Openbox or LXDE that makes minimal or no use
> >>>of dbus.
> >>>
> >>>* Don't use NetworkManager. I don't remember whether Wicd uses dbus or
> >>>not. If Wicd uses dbus, just do a combination of iwlist scanning and
> >>>wpa_supplicant to "dial in" Wifi.
> >wpa_cli will also work; if anyone's interested, I've written a shellscript
> >based on dialog that simplifies configuring wpa_supplicant.
>

>     I don't understand why you, Isaac, and also Steve want to do this
> yourself and always avoid speaking of wpa_gui. wpa_gui will really help you
> configuring wpa_supplicant. It detects all the needed parameters and only
> requires you to enter the secret keys. Why rewrite all this yourself (unless
> for training)?

My main motive was the fact that wpa_gui will not work unless you already
have a working wpa_supplicant.conf & wpa_supplicant is running.
(My script was partly inspired by how hard it is to figure out what goes
in wpa_supplicant.conf if you've never used wpa_supplicant before.)
It also has to do with Qt4 vs. dialog: one drags in one of the largest
GUI toolkits around, and the other is a couple hundred kilobytes,
runs in text mode, and only depends on a single library that's basically
guaranteed to be installed and implements a POSIX API, with an installed
size in the half megabyte range.
(In case you're wondering about the "POSIX API" part, curses is part of
POSIX; dialog only needs ncurses.)

For what it's worth, my script also works with whiptail, although --
contrary to the whiptail docs -- whiptail ends up using many times
the space on i386, between libslang, libnewt, and libpopt, besides
being buggy. In theory, it will also work with Xdialog if you have it.

>     BTW I had a look at wicd the other day and read I could only configure
> it for one  wifi station. Is that true? wpa_supplicant can store an
> unlimited list of stations and connect to the one it detects... I have more
> than 30 in my wpa_supplicant.conf -- labs, homes, hotels, bars.

I don't recall seeing any signs of such a limitation when I used wicd
for connecting to wireless at home and at college...
That said, when I tried it was fond of spawning lots of wpa_supplicant
processes.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham