I can confirm that adding "iface wlan0 inet dhcp" to
/etc/network/interfaces fixes it.

New problem: I can't get eth0 to connect using netman. This is in a
virtualbox installation of devuan alpha2 netinstall. I purged wicd and
rebooted. I copied the executables from the other installation, I've got
'iface eth0 inet dhcp' in interfaces, and it works with ifup/ifdown on
command line.

If I try to connect with netman, it fails. Running 'ifconfig eth0' before
trying to connect with netmane does not help.

If I connect with 'ifup eth0' and then try to disconnect with netman, it
fails. If I try to disconnect with 'backend 5' I get:

user@devuan-a2:~/netman$ ./backend 5
ifdown: failed to open lockfile /run/network/.ifstate.lock: Permission denied
user@devuan-a2:~/netman$ ls -l /run/network/.ifstate.lock
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 7 09:21 /run/network/.ifstate.lock

Deleting the lockfile doesn't help.

There's no backend command for connecting eth0, so I can't get any
terminal output.

-fsmithred