Re: nm-applet requires gnome?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 23:02 +0100, Joost Kremers wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> i'm trying to install NetworkManager on a slackintosh (ppc-port of
> slackware) installation, with xfce but not gnome installed. NetworkManager
> itself compiled and installed fine, provided (of course) that i configure
> it with --without-gnome.
> 
> i then went looking for nm-applet, but found it wasn't there. eventually, i
> found a changelog entry that mentioned it was now in a separate SVN module,
> after which i quickly found the 0.6.5 sources on the gnome ftp
> server. (TBH, i think it would be a good idea to mention this fact in the
> README or INSTALL of NetworkManager.)
> 
> however, running configure fails with a message about gconf not being
> found. in this case, configuring with --without-gnome has no effect.
> 
> from what i understand, NetworkManager needs nm-applet to be useful at
> all. so does this mean that NM no longer aims to be agnostic about the
> desktop-environment it's running under, or is there another way to use NM,
> i.e. without nm-applet?

The NM daemon itself is desktop agnostic.  But it does need something to
tell it what to do and to push user configuration back to NM.  That
thing (the applet) must integrate with the desktop environment and store
configuration and handle passwords in the ways that the user expects
from that DE.  There are applets for Gnome and KDE.  How does xfce store
normally store configuration and preferences?  Does it have a keyring of
any type in which to securely store passwords?

Dan