Wicd: The Solution For All Your Linux Wireless Woes!

Published on December 26, 2007 in Apps by Rami Taibah

Update: Lately this article has been getting some traffic from StumbleUpon and Reddit, however I would just like to bring to your attention that this is post is outdated. I personally haven’t used Wicd for quite a long time, not really a fan of wireless. Anyways, my original source is currently recommending going back to Network Manager. Proceed at your own risk.

Last week I got a phone call from my cousin asking for help with his laptop, and apparently my Linux evangelism paid off and I heard from the other end “Rami, I want you to install Linux on my laptop.” Like any Linux geek, I happily obliged. I burned an Ubuntu Gutsy CD and installed it for him. Besides some auto mounting glitches that were fixed fairly quickly, everything went fine.

However, a few days ago, I got the highly anticipated and dreaded after-call that something wasn’t right. He went back to his folks house and he couldn’t connect to their wireless network. I sensed trouble instantly, Ubuntu and wireless aren’t real good friends. So I headed down there to try to fix his issue. Apparently he needed to have WEP + static IP in order to connect. After a few trial and errors with the Ubuntu Network Manager, it became evident that it is WORTHLESS! It is so buggy and unfriendly I almost gauged my eyeballs!

So I Googled away, jumping from forum to forum, and blog to another. Nothing seemed to work! after around 3 hours I almost gave up, until I stumbled into a lockergnome post by Matt Harley. Now this was not your regular Howto, it was more of a rant (a video one also!), Matt recommended a program called wicd. Abra cadabra it worked!

wicd is such a nice program, I really don’t know why Ubuntu (and other distros) don’t include it. It is miles ahead of the default Gnome network manager, I can’t understand how you can call a network manager a manager if you can’t configure each connection by right clicking on it or whatever. With wicd I can add an IP, gateway, subnetwork mask to each connection. I can also choose the type of encryption of each network and add specific scripts!!

Thank you Matt for sharing your expertise with us, and I will be definitely reading reading your articles lockergnome from now on!

About Rami Taibah

Rami Taibah the founder of The Linuxologist and a self proclaimed geek and Linux aficionado. This fall, he will be pursuing an MIMS degree at UC Berkeley, California. You can follow him on Twitter @rtaibah.