WICD for Mint 8 Xfce edition?

[bbear]

It looks like wicd does not work with my Linksys WUSB600N V2 wireless-n USB adapter in Mint 8 Xfce edition.

I have just had to use synaptic to reinstall network-manager and my Linksys adapter now connects. This would normally be a good thing except that I have had nothing but problems with network-manager in Mint 7 Gloria and Mint 8 Helena.

For Mint 7 and Mint 8 I had to switch to using wicd, since that I have not had any issues with drop-outs of my wireless-n connection. With network-manager the drop-outs of the connection showed up as glitches in audio when streaming AAC from my Windows box/samba share.

Maybe network-manager in the Xfce edition doesn't have this problem, I will have to give it a try.

Does anyone know if there is a particular reason why wicd would work with this adapter in Mint 7 & 8 but not Xfce?

[bbear]

Maybe network-manager in the Xfce edition doesn't have this problem, I will have to give it a try.

Unfortunately network-manager in Xfce edition has the same wireless drop-out problems as I experienced in Mint 7 and Mint 8.

I would like to try to get wicd to work in Xfce Edition

Note, when I say 'doesn't work', I don't mean that network-manager is broken as such. In fact it seems to work fine for my wired 1Gbs connection. The problem is that when using wicd in Xfce, my Linksys adapter is not recognized. Using 'lsusb' it shows the adapter ok. 'modprobe' also shows that my rt3572sta driver is also loaded ok. For some reason however, wicd cannot detect any wireless networks and the blue led on my Linksys adapter does not light.

I have had quite a bit of experience with Mint 6, Mint8 and Ubuntu Jaunty and KArmic with getting the Linksys adapter to work. It is only with Mint 8 Xfce that all my attempts have failed. I don't know if this is a Mint, Xfce or wicd issue. If anyone has any ideas/suggestions please let me know,

thanks

[merlwiz79]

It could be that the wrong device is selected.
It might be wlan0 but WICD has eth1 set as the wifi connection.
Double check the preferences.

[bbear]

It could be that the wrong device is selected.
It might be wlan0 but WICD has eth1 set as the wifi connection.
Double check the preferences.

The problem is that as far as wicd is concerned, no wireless adapter exists. All it shows me is one available connection, it is the wired Ethernet connection. Also, the blue light on my Linksys adapter does not light, which from my experience with Mint 7 and Mint 8 and getting the adapter to work, means either the driver has not loaded or is blacklisted, or some similar problem.

However, I know the adapter is working ok** in Xfce Edition as when I uninstall and reinstall network-manager the adapter is recognized straight away, the blue light comes on and network-manager is able to connect to it.

I will double-check the preferences and also search through the wicd bugs list on launchpad

** although I can establish a connection using my Linksys adpater using network-manager in Xfce, I get the same frequenct drop-out problem I experienced in Mint 7, Mint 8 and Ubuntu Karmic when usign network-manager, that is why it is critical that I get wicd working.

thanks for your help.

[bbear]

Tonight I discovered that although my Linksys adapter is not coming up automatically when I use wicd, it appears that it is not completely dead as iwpriv seems to know that ra0 exists ..

mint8-xfce-desktop log # iwpriv
lo no private ioctls.

eth0 no private ioctls.

pan0 no private ioctls.

ra0 Available private ioctls :
set (8BE2) : set 1024 char & get 0
connStatus (0004) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
driverVer (0005) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
bainfo (0006) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
descinfo (0007) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
radio_off (000A) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
radio_on (000B) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
dlsentryinfo (0014) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
show (0015) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
adhocEntry (0016) : set 1024 char & get 2047 char
bbp (8BE3) : set 2047 char & get 2047 char
mac (8BE5) : set 1024 char & get 1024 char
rf (8BF3) : set 2047 char & get 2047 char
e2p (8BE7) : set 1024 char & get 1024 char
stat (8BE9) : set 0 & get 2047 char
get_site_survey (8BED) : set 0 & get 1024 char

iwconfig only returns the following information:

mint8-xfce-desktop log # iwconfig ra0
ra0 Ralink STA


As mentioned earlier, I know the Linksys adapter works and the ralink driver has been installed correctly as it *worked* before with network-manager when I first installed Mint 8 Xfce.

I wonder what it is about wicd in the Xfce version of Mint which is preventing my Linksys adapter from coming up. Does anyone have any ideas?

[bbear]

It could be that the wrong device is selected.
It might be wlan0 but WICD has eth1 set as the wifi connection.
Double check the preferences.

I just double-checked again and spotted that under wicd Preferences/General/Network Interfaces that the name for the wireless network was blanked out. I just entered 'ra0' in there (without the quotes) and clicked on 'ok' and the blue light on my Linksys Adapter lit up. I don't know how I missed that section of the preferences before

Strange, but I can't ever recall having to fill this field in with my Mint 7 and Mint 8 wicd installs so I guess it must get filled in automatically some how for those Mint distributions.

Anyway, I was able to set up the WPA2 passphrase and can connect to my wireless network.

thanks so much for your help.