# wicd question

## ONEEYEMAN

Hi, ALL,

I recently bought an Acer Aspire and made it dual-boot with Gentoo and Windows 7.

The installation went thru fine (please see this for reference).

Right now I can successfully connect to unsecured AP with wireless-tools. There is no problem whatsoever with obtaining an IP.

Now at home I have a Security turned on. In order to work with WPA I installed wpa_supplicant and wicd.

Today, I executed following scenario.

I successfully connected to a public unsecured network and was working for some time.

After that I just closed the lid and went to my co-worker house where there is also WPA secured AP.

I opened the lid and ran the wicd GUI. It scanned, correctly saw all APs in the range.

I selected the proper AP and asked it to connect. It tried to connect to the original unsecured network.

I had to reboot the laptop.

After the reboot, I ran the wicd GUI again.

This time it tried to connect but failed to associate with the AP.

The laptop is using GNOME with baselayout-2 on AMD64 Gentoo install.

2 questions:

1. How do I fix wicd so that I don't have to reboot every single time I move?

2. What needs to be done in order to see the wicd failure to associate? Does it have it's own log file or it throws everything in dmesg? And what needs to be posted here in order to troubleshoot the issue?

Thank you.

----------

## keenblade

Does this work?

```

/etc/init.d/wicd restart

or

/etc/init.d/dbus restart

```

Anyway, I'd give a try to nm-applet.

----------

## ONEEYEMAN

Hi,

```

IgorReinCloud igor # /etc/init.d/wicd restart

 * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service

 * Stopping wicd daemon and closing connections ...                       [ ok ]

 * Starting wicd daemon ...                                               [ ok ]

IgorReinCloud igor # /etc/init.d/dbus restart

 * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service

 * Stopping wicd daemon and closing connections ...                       [ ok ]

 * Stopping D-BUS system messagebus ...                                   [ ok ]

 * Starting D-BUS system messagebus ...                                   [ ok ]

IgorReinCloud igor #  * Starting wicd daemon ...                          [ ok ]

```

No problems whatsoever.

And what is nm-applet?

Thank you.

----------

## keenblade

I mean after restarting wicd and or dbus services, you may connect without restarting.

nm-aplet is the wicd gui equivalent for network manager. It is more advanced than wicd.

I use net-misc/networkmanager with gnome-extra/nm-applet. Works great here.

Anyway, you may start wicd-gtk from console and watch the error messages to get a clue.

It seems wicd log is there:

```

/var/log/wicd/wicd.log

```

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## Yuu

Hi,

 *ONEEYEMAN wrote:*   

> I selected the proper AP and asked it to connect. It tried to connect to the original unsecured network

 

I have the same issue for a long time here.

When I try to connect to another AP : on the Wicd status bar says something like "Connnecting to <AP name here>...". It's just that the "<AP name here>" is wrong, but Wicd connects to the right AP : that's just a cosmetic issue.

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## ONEEYEMAN

Hi, guys,

2keenblade: I shouldn't have to re-start anything. All I need is to bring up the GUI and click connect.

Also, nm-applet is something that is part of wicd or it's a different package all together?

Is it possible that wpa_supplicant does not support my card?

2Yuu: Well, it does not work here. It failed to connect properly to the new AP.

Which card and which version of wpa_supplicant do you have? What's your encryption type?

Thank you.

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## keenblade

 *ONEEYEMAN wrote:*   

> Hi, guys,
> 
> 2keenblade: I shouldn't have to re-start anything. All I need is to bring up the GUI and click connect.
> 
> Also, nm-applet is something that is part of wicd or it's a different package all together?
> ...

 

Yes, you shouldn't have to restart any services. But it is better than restarting the pc, as a work around.

gnome-extra/nm-applet is a different package, more advanced and better than wicd I think. If you want to use nm-applet, emerge nm-applet and networkmanager.

Then remove wicd form default runlevel and add NetworkManager:

```

rc-update dell wicd default

rc-update add NetworkManager default

```

Maybe problem is something with your wireless driver. What wireless card and driver do you use?

Edit: I noticed your wireless card is Atheros one probably using ath9k driver. You may take a look at ath9k bugs - Linux Wireless. I'd look, but unfortunately site can't be opened here for a reason.

----------

## Yuu

I think keenblade is right, maybe that's a wireless driver related problem...

@ONEEYEMAN : My card is :  0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)

I have the stable version of net-wireless/wpa_supplicant : 0.7.3-r2

I'm using the WPA1 (AES/CCMP) encryption.

Good luck

----------

## wrc1944

I'm confused by your statement  *Quote:*   

> I successfully connected to a public unsecured network and was working for some time.
> 
> After that I just closed the lid and went to my co-worker house where there is also WPA secured AP.

 

Is this just a typo (you meant "unsecured" and accidentally typed "secured" regarding the co-worker house)?

If not, you would need the password to use the secured AP at co-worker's.  If co-worker's is another unsecured AP you should be able to select it, and connect via dhcpcd, but if you have "connect automatically to this network" checked for the first unsecured AP you used, that might cause the problem, possibly even if it's NOT in the current list of detected AP's.  Apparently Wicd really takes the auto-connect to this network checkmark option seriously, and saves that selection. 

I've used Wicd for over 2 years, and feel it's the currently the best and easiest to work with- in fact I always change any distro's default NM setup to wicd.

I've configured Wicd on many different types of distros and setups, including using multiple  bridged routers with static addresses for difficult situations, various different cards/routers, etc. etc.  There was the recent but brief python/dbus/Wicd problem, but that was fixed.  You might need wicd-1.7.1_beta2-r4 if you run into that, but if you need a GUI network config app from my experience I'd currently recommend Wicd over anything else.  NM sometimes was a PITA, at least for me, whereas Wicd never fails me.

EDIT- Wicd has a log in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log

----------

## ONEEYEMAN

Hi, guys,

```

lspci -k

.................................

07:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9287 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

   Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. Device e034

   Kernel driver in use: ath9k

   Kernel modules: ath9k

IgorReinCloud igor # emerge -pv wpa_supplicant

 * Last emerge --sync was 36d 10h 4m 30s ago.

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

[ebuild   R   ] net-wireless/wpa_supplicant-0.7.3-r2  USE="dbus readline ssl -debug -eap-sim -fasteap -gnutls -madwifi (-ps3) -qt4 -wimax -wps" 0 kB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB

 * IMPORTANT: 2 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.

 * Use eselect news to read news items.

IgorReinCloud igor # emerge -pv wicd          

 * Last emerge --sync was 36d 10h 5m 36s ago.

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!

[ebuild   R   ] net-misc/wicd-1.7.1_beta2-r3  USE="X gtk libnotify ncurses nls pm-utils (-ioctl)" 0 kB

Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), Size of downloads: 0 kB

 * IMPORTANT: 2 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.

 * Use eselect news to read news items.

```

And no it's not a typo, that AP was secured, but apparently it might not be with WPA2 which is default selection for wicd.

Next time I am there I will look at the log.

If the encryption time is different will there be an appropriate error in the log?

Thank you.

----------

