[pkg-fso-maint] wicd vs. wifi-radar

[Luca Capello]

Hi Gregor!

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:52:26 +0100, gregor herrmann wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:18:58 +0100, Luca Capello wrote:
>
>> I am sorry to revive an old thread, but I have started to play with
>> graphical WiFi manager only now :-)
>
> Welcome to the club :)

Thank you, but I think I will leave it early to go back to CLI (as in
Command Line Interface, not the Mono stuff) tools...

>> Well, without having used wicd yet, it is clear to me that you need
>> to have root privileges in someway, since network interfaces
>> configuration (and wpasupplicant, in case) requires that.
>
> That's handled by the daemon (which indeed runs as root), the
> interaction via the client runs as a "normal" user, with one
> exception:
[...]
> but this behaviour is documented in wicd(8) and is no show-stopper for
> using the client as non-root.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, to which I fully agree.

>> OTOH wifi-radar does not have this option and it always need to be
>> started as root.  However, reading /usr/share/doc/wifi-radar/README.gz I
>> discovered that it seems there is a way to use it with PAM
>> authentication.  I have not tried it yet and indeed it seems a bit too
>> sophisticated than wicd.
>
> Hm, sounds interesting; but the description is really a bit
> non-trivial ...
> And configuring WPA manually also doesn't sound very attractive.

Surely not, but IMHO as most of the CLI tools, once you get used to it
they have no adversary than can bite them.  Obviously, for a newbie this
is a no-op, I agree.

>> I think the major advantage of wifi-radar is the fact that is it way
>> smaller than wicd, 168kB vs. 2300kB, considering the dependencies as
>> well (wicd is not yet "compatible" with udhcpc, see bug #520014 [2]).
>
> And the wicd daemon+client also use quite a few resources at runtime.

I have not checked this before and indeed it would have been a negative
point if...

>> However, considering that wifi-radar does not even start on my FR (bug
>> #520845 [3]) 
>
> Works for me (with dhcp3-client instead of udhcp) but it's similarly
> slow and resource-hungry as wicd ...

...wifi-radar was not resource-hungry.  I guess in both cases the cause
is Python, so I think there is nothing we can do :-(

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 314 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-fso-maint/attachments/20090323/15b993cc/attachment.pgp