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

[gregor herrmann]

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 :)
 
> 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:

> Bug #519915 [1] in part
> confirms it, 

AFAICS that only relates to configuring pre/post-scripts via the
client interface. Not that I really understand why the rest of the
config works via some d-bus magic but these variables don't, but this
behaviour is documented in wicd(8) and is no show-stopper for using
the client as non-root.

> as well as /usr/share/doc/wicd/README.Debian:

Right, non-root users have to be in the netdev group.

> 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.
 
> 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.
 
> 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 ...

Cheers,
gregor

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