Considering NetworkManager for EasyOS

There are ongoing issues with Internet connection in EasyOS and Quirky. The pups also. We have lots of network and Internet connections apps -- in Easy there is Simple Network Setup, Frisbee, and the old Network Wizard. Puppy developers have created more, such as PeasyWiFi.

They all have problems. In Easy, there are ethernet and wifi issues -- the ethernet cable seeming to be not connected, wifi refusing sometimes to connect to my phone hotspot. Some of them have confusing UIs.

So, we get a situation where we think Internet is configured, then at next bootup it doesn't connect, and have to go through the setup again.

Darn, my baby laptop with Win10 connects and reconnects to the phone hotspot flawlessly.

I am playing with NetworkManager, and it is a very pleasant experience. This is the utility used in most of the mainline distros. It has a daemon, 'NetworkManager', and a cli app 'nmcli'. The daemon pretty much "just works" without any configuration, for ethernet anyway. Just start the daemon, that's it.

There is a tray applet, a different package, 'network-manager-applet', which does work, although I am uncomfortable with the number of dependencies.

The 'nmcli' utility could be used as the basis for our own custom GUI. For wireless, real easy:

# nmcli device wifi list
# nmcli device wifi connect <ssid> password <password>

Very keen to release Easy 0.9.8, to show off the new SFSget, however, might delay for a couple more days, throw out all the network connection apps, replace with NetworkManager. 

Tags: easy