thelinuxlink.net

My ethernet broke. I think it is an onboard ethernet port hardware failure as everything else works fine.

1. I plugged in an rt2500 PCI wireless card.
2. Used Gnome Network Manager to connect with no problems.
3. Gnome Network Manager in Xubuntu annoyingly prompts for a password at every login.
4. I just listened to the latest TLLTS, so thought I'd install wicd to see if I could avoid the password.
5. I inserted the wicd repositories into sources.list.
6. sudo aptitude install wicd, which uninstalled gnome-network-manager
7. wicd does not support rt2500 cards

I am totally screwed.
* No ethernet
* No wireless
* No way to install network manager

I know this screw up is all my fault, but wicd isn't ready to replace network-manager until it supports rt2500.

Download the network-manager package on another machine and save it to a thumb drive. Move the thumb drive to your laptop and do 'sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb'. You should be good to go.

Thanks Pat

I didn't know it was possible to download the package separately. I tried downloading the source, but didn't have build-essential installed on that machine.

It was easier to just reinstall Xubuntu.

How do either of these management daemons "support" chipsets of one type or another? I mean, unless I'm (once again) missing something, what you are talking about is a kernel module that is or is not being loaded at boot time, no?

All I know is that wicd could not connect to my router. In the preferences dialog, you can choose your chipset (atheros etc). Nothing like rt2500 was on the list.

Regular network manager connects fine.

Interesting; but the card should work, according to the wicd forums: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/phpbb/searc ... mit=Search

There have been issues reported though, in certain situations. Perhaps the solution to the problem lies there?

Thanks Dann. I'll have a hunt around.

Iain wrote:All I know is that wicd could not connect to my router. In the preferences dialog, you can choose your chipset (atheros etc). Nothing like rt2500 was on the list.

Regular network manager connects fine.

Why don't you just use wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd and reinstall NetworkManager?

Wally Balljacker wrote:Why don't you just use wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd and reinstall NetworkManager?

The rt2500 does not use wpa_supplicant. The Ralink drivers have their own native WPA implementation. I have several of these cards and WPA does work, but you have to configure it very differently.