Even before NetworkManager came to be, connecting to different wireless networks was a annoying work. Very often networks don’t require the same configuration, so you create some nifty alias for it. My aliases have served me well in the past years, but they have their drawbacks. I was still required to type them in everytime I wanted to connect to a network, since I had no auto-connection feature. It also looked very geeky, which made me the “Linux geek” instead of the “Linux user”. Since I know that Ubuntu is a great distribution, there had to be a solution for these wireless troubles.

A while after that NetworkManager came into the picture and I thought my life was about to get a lot easier. Au contraire, my life didn’t get easier. Why? NetworkManager is a good ‘try’, but has severe drawbacks and was always ‘funky’ about my WPA2 setup. This shouldn’t be ‘funky’ since it’s simply a matter of calling wpa_supplicant with a working configuration and it works.

While I was reading my daily batch of IT news, I came across this article on Linux.com. I read through it with a lot of scepticism, since I’m a bit picky about the software I want to run. It looked very promising and minimal (like it should be) and I went to the project page. I added their repository to my sources.list, updated my list and installed wicd. I set up my WPA2 AP, set it to autoconnect and it worked. Then I rebooted and my interface went up magically! Wireless woes are over! Use wicd!