Wicd, which stands for Wireless Interface Connection Daemon, is an open-source

software utility Utility software is software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. It is used to support the computer infrastructure - in contrast to application software, which is aimed at directly performing tasks that benefit or ...

to manage both

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

and wired

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

s for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. The project started in late 2006 with the creation of Connection Manager, which eventually became Wicd. Wicd aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings. Wicd will only automatically connect to wireless networks you have specified and will not automatically connect to an unknown network. Wicd supports wireless encryption using

wpa_supplicant wpa_supplicant is a free software implementation of an IEEE 802.11i supplicant for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, QNX, AROS, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, OS/2 (including ArcaOS and eComStation) and Haiku. In addition to being a WPA3 and WPA2 sup ...

. Users can design their own "templates", which can be used by Wicd to connect to a large variety of networks using any type of encryption wpa_supplicant supports. Wicd is split into two major components: the daemon, and the user interface. These two components communicate via

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...

. This design allows the user interface to run as a standard user, and the daemon to run as the root user, so the user can change the wireless network without knowing the root password. The split interface/daemon design would also allow a person to write a new front-end to the Wicd daemon, such a
wicd-qt
There are also other front-ends available for many DEs such as GNOME, Xfce, and

Fluxbox Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the des ...

. Wicd is currently available in some Linux distributions, such as Debian, Gentoo Linux,

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributio ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

and

Zenwalk Linux Zenwalk GNU/Linux is a desktop-focused Linux distribution founded by Jean-Philippe Guillemin. It is based on Slackware with very few modifications at system level making it 100% compatible with Slackware. Zenwalk aims to be a modern and multi-p ...

References

Applications using D-Bus Free network-related software Free software programmed in Python Software that uses ncurses Software that uses PyGTK {{Linux-stub

See also

References