Re: Configure WLAN without applet?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 09:17 +0200, Tassilo Horn wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've recently switched from traditional network setup (with
> wpa_supplicant) to NetworkManager, and it seems to work pretty well.
> Unfortunately, to set up encryption one's supposed to use one of these
> three NM frontends:
> 
>       - Gnome NM applet
>       - knetworkmanager
>       - pyNetworkManager
> 
> I don't want to use the first two, cause I don't use Gnome nor KDE, so
> I've installed the last one and the applet sits in my XFCE tray.  It
> lists my local WLAN, but the functionality to set a PSK for it seems to
> be broken.  (Also the webpage states that it is very buggy...)

What version of NetworkManager?  0.6.x or 0.7?

> So is it possible to configure that WLAN without any of those applets,
> maybe with some dbus calls?

Yes, either with shell scripts + dbus-send, or with python and dbus.

> If not, are there other frontends (preferably cli) beside the three
> above?

Not too many, unfortunately.  Tambet started a python-based CLI
front-end that he hasn't published yet *hint hint*.  It's pretty easy to
control NM via Python though.  You first need a service that provides
connections (ie, configured networks and settings) to NetworkManager
which is either the user applet or the system settings daemon.  Once you
have that service running, and have told it about the connections you'd
like to use, you can pretty easily tell NM which one to use via
dbus-send or python and dbus.

Dan