Wicd or Network-Manager-Gnome
I have used network-manager since I started using gnome. It has always worked well or so I thought until last week when I could not get the wifi working on my wife’s laptop. I knew it worked because I had used the very same laptop for 2 years before I bought my new ASUS last winter. Ii even was working with the trial version of LMDE and I might have put the release version of LMDE back on but without it being maintained right now I didn’t want to use it on her laptop. So I decided to put LM 11 RC1 on it, after I had been using it on my laptop since it’s release without any major issues. Now the saga begins…..
Doesn’t need any of the 64 bit functions about all she does is surf and email so I installed the 32 bit Kayta, this was after I backed up her stuff of course. Did all the upgrades, now just so you know we’re connected to ethernet with a cable this whole time. Oh did I mention the laptop has a Broadcom 4312 wifi nic? Well it does and this is the way I always do new installs (never do upgrades just to many issues) as it seems to work better this way.
Well no wifi it says that the wifi card is deactivted, but yet the little blue light was on and I could toggle it on an off with it’s mechanical switch. Tried LM 11 RC1 32 bit, LM 10 32 bit, which by the way had been on the same laptop before so I knew it worked. I searched and tried this and that, nothing. I saw several post of where people recommended changing from network-manager to wicd. Just couldn’t see what that was going to do but I was running out of options and I had spent the better part for an afternoon doing something that should have maybe taken and hour & a half total. Removed network-manager installed wicd rebooted pulled the ethernet cable and there it was the SSID of my wifi network, entered my passcode and off I went. Been working ever since.
So for the last couple of days my laptop have been dropping it’s wifi connection, with no other indication other than I can’t access anything on the internet. The connection would last maybe 5 minutes the drop the connection. Rebooted the router to see if that would help anything, nope same thing. Thought wicd was working well on the wife’s laptop so I installed it using package manager, remove network-manager-gnome and rebooted. Did all this over wifi btw. The rest of the evening my connection was rock solid and so far today if has been the same. I may just start installing wicd off the get go when I do an install