Comments on: Wpa_gui is Underrated

By: Serafean

Serafean — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:24:09 +0000

Hi, just stopping by to acknowledge that wpa_gui is all I need; but I must say that when I first saw it a few years back, it scared me away (no network scan at first glance: one has to go to another tab; I’ve grown wiser since). It does have that power-user-ish feel to it… Thanks for bringing it up. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but,technically speaking, could there be a network abstraction in Solid for wpa_supplicant (as there is for wicd/Networkmanager)? It seems to me that with a better GUI wpa_supplicant is all an average user needs (1 process less in the background, YAY!!)

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:58:49 +0000

dhcpcd is always running, so when wpa_supplicant marks wlan0 as up, dhcpcd sees and requests an IP.

By: Vytautas

Vytautas — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:45:01 +0000

How can you make wpa_supplicant request IP through dhcp ?

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:10:06 +0000

Hey I'm glad it worked out well for you. I've never used wicd on my gentoo box, so I haven't had this hassle of migration, but all those steps of wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 are suggested in the networking section of the gentoo handbook, so by the time I got around to discovering wpa_gui, I was already setup. The top 3 lines of my wpa_supplicant.conf are: ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant ctrl_interface_group=wheel update_config=1

By: Nicolas Dietrich

Nicolas Dietrich — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:32:18 +0000

Wow – I’m pretty surprised I didn’t know about it – thanks for the pointer!

I’m also quite surprised / shocked by reading the comments, which imply that technical simplicity is not considered elegant by a lot of people

Btw – it didn’t work out of the box on my Gentoo system, I had to
– create a wpa_supplicant.conf file first to allow all users to connect (not needed in wicd since server always runs as root and clients connect via dbus)
– explicitly load the wpa_supplicant module in the network configuration file (not needed in wicd, since server starts wpa_supplicant directly)

Great! One layer less!

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:01:49 +0000

which? in the tray?

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:01:35 +0000

No. bloated is bloated, buggy is buggy. Simple is simple, fast is fast, good is good.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:29:33 +0000

FAIL. Not so.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:29:09 +0000

You mistake “good” for “technical” and “bad” for “simplistic”.

The line is so simple.

By: TGM

TGM — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:25:36 +0000

Love the icon

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:19:54 +0000

Good point about the popularity in guides.

You’re right about the n00b linux user, who *should* have the most slick and easy configuration method possible. But for any user worth his salt who wants a good interface sans bloat, wpa_gui rocks.

By: charly

charly — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:48:16 +0000

Well, most guides about wireless networking on linux don’t mention wpa_gui, i guess its a significant reason for its low popularity.

Now that i gave it a try, it seems its aimed audience is not the average joe linux user, but rather the geek who want to know his mac address. I don’t feel uncompfortable with that, but i don’t understand why you try to make people use an ugly ui which is _just_ a wpa_supplicant gui and _not_ an integrated network management service as someone pointed out already.

By: david

david — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:33:34 +0000

I will definitely give it a try cause nm doesn’t connect to all networks or times out randomly.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:33:52 +0000

wicd is running in addition to wpa_supplicant, since all wireless needs wpa_suppliacant. never had any problems with it, im sure, since wicd is a good solution, but why the extra layer?

more importantly, i’m interested in why wpa_gui is not very popular and why lots of people do not know about it.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:32:40 +0000

Sounds terrible. I can’t believe how many people still use the NM applet from 3.5. What’s wvdial like? I’ve never used it.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:32:00 +0000

So can wpa_gui/wpa_supplicant. This is a native feature of wpa_supplicant, and is configurable by the conf file, the gui, or the cli.

By: moltonel

moltonel — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:09:48 +0000

I think NM has the advantage of being all-in-one and well integrated by gnome and by specific distributions. If it’s in the default install and does what you need, most people will not know or care about the bloat.

wpa_supplicant used to be a pain to configure, but I retried it recently and I’m now as happy as can be (simple needs, though).
On my netbook running Arch (all other machines using gentoo), I settled for wicd a while back, but I think I’ll switch to wap_supplicant there too.

By: maninalift

maninalift — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:56:34 +0000

I use wicd which I have never had any problems with and which could never be described as bloated. My only qualm is that it would be nice if it were Qt. Perhaps that’s a reason to try wpa_gui

Had bad experiences with NM though

By: jbernardo

jbernardo — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:04:51 +0000

I use wicd, but maybe I’ll switch to wpa gui. NM with its idiotic habit of scanning every minute together with the buggy ath9k drivers means that with it my network is down one minute out of every two.

By: Marvin

Marvin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:55:54 +0000

I still use networkmanager from kde 3.5 on kde4. It seems to be the only kde nm which is capable using my gsm/gprs/umts device. Others either don’t work or crash. wvdial works too tough.

By: ephemient

ephemient — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:24:08 +0000

I use wicd because it can automatically join known networks and switch based on preference even when there’s nobody logged in.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:50:00 +0000

Aren’t there other ways at querying connectivity that use standard linux interfaces? Pidgin seems to know what the deal is with my connectivity without NM.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:46:07 +0000

The reason why is because obviously network connectivity and control should be a service that your computer offers applications, and not JUST a simple commandline/GUI tool for user management. The scope of NM is much greater.

WPA_gui seems great – and I’ve been burnt many times by bad WPA in NM, trust me – but a compelling application platform must offer developers ways to communicate and query network connectivity.

In addition, NM does seem to be -very good- at integrating bluetooth and cell phones in one complete package.

It’s a great tool, but modern computing experiences demand more than great tools. It requires great integration. I hope that NM can be as reliable as possible though, so maybe it should learn a thing or two from WPA-gui.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:43:55 +0000

Netplug also requires zero configuration (emerge netplug and presto). But I didn’t really have to tweak anything at all. I run Gentoo so there also wasn’t the additional step of getting rid of NM, since it was never there in the first place.

By: robo1337

robo1337 — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:37:54 +0000

Honestly, I didn’t try this app before, so I just know it from manpages and your blogpost. I was refering to bluetooth and wired connections if that wasn’t clear before.

Your post pretty much sounded like you had to tweak quite a few config files and scripts for those two connection methods (netplug [wired], ppp [bt->nokia]). I couldn’t find any hints wpagui supported these methods on the internet, so excuse me if I told anything wrong

Anyway, this just looks like a nice way for configuring networks. Definitely worth a try when networkmanager decides to give up work (again… )

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:54:42 +0000

Actually, it requires zero configuration, since wpa_supplicant is used no matter what. All you have to do is run wpa_gui. No configuration needed. In fact, I could also click on the K menu, go to applications, and presto, there it is.

My setup “just works” with no configuration necessary.

By: robo1337

robo1337 — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:52:30 +0000

There’s a simple reason for that: Simplicity. You have to configure this before you can use it and it just doesn’t sound too easy. Of course, you can do it, I can do it and most of the readers of this blog could probably do it too but it consumes more time than simply installing networkmanager and configure all settings for all devices at a central place quickly. This doesn’t take any longer than a minute and I’m sure it’s easier than

“For wired networking, netplug calls my ethernet setup scripts when I plug in an ethernet cable. No tinkering required. For my cellphone internet via bluetooth, I run “pon nokia” and my ppp chatscript does all the rest. This could easily be tied to a little menu button in my launcher.”

The problem is, this “just works” with the gnome nm-applet and the KDE one still has its bugs despite KDE4.0 was released two years ago.

I don’t really unterstand the problem, though, the KDE Networkmanager applet seems to work quite well nowadays. This would’ve been the perfect blog post one year ago

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:52:11 +0000

It remembers all the settings and you can store the priorities or have it unprioritized. Actually, this is a feature of wpa_supplicant, which is nicely exposed by wpa_gui, wpa_cli, or the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:51:04 +0000

Nope — wpa_supplicant does everything – wpa, wpa, all the interface up/down management, starting dhcpcd etc.

By: Ryan T

Ryan T — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:47:48 +0000

Does wpa_gui remember the authentication settings for every network you connect to, and then automatically reconnect to those networks when it detects them in the future? Or does it always require manual intervention to connect to a network?

By: Leo S

Leo S — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:30:13 +0000

> Why are you all using NM, wicd, etc instead of good ol’ wpa_gui?

I always assumed it only did WPA, given the name. Ohwell, NM works just fine as well (for me), and lots of distros set it up automatically these days, so I don’t see a reason to switch.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:40:10 +0000

“Why are you all using NM, wicd, etc instead of good ol’ wpa_gui?”

Well, because this is the first I’ve heard of it. I wish I had one of my laptops with me, then I could give it a spin right now.