Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

If you've been missing WICD or NetworkManager, this pet is for you.

Wpa_gui runs in the background and automatically connects you to any open wireless network it finds. Encrypted Network? No problem, just hit scan, double click your network, and enter the password. Choose file->save, and you'll be automatically connected whenever you're in range. Since, wpa_gui is a simple frontend to wpa_supplicant, written by the team that wrote wpa_supplicant, you can expect WPA-encrypted connections to work without much hassle (hopefully, I don't have a wpa network so I didn't test this). Wpa_gui will even handle your Ethernet connections, giving you a convenient one-stop shop for most of your networking needs.

To install the pet, first you need to install the qt4 pet from the puppy4 repository. You'll also probably want to disable any automatic connections you setup with the Network Wizard. Then install the attached pet and restart.

The pet puts a script named networking in /root/Startup that automatically runs when you login. To prevent wpa_gui from starting automatically, move the script somewhere else. If your network interfaces are called something other than wlan0 and eth0 you'll need to modify the script. Let me know if you have any problems with this, and I'll try to help.

a-dub · Joined: 14 Oct 2009 Posts: 8

Yay!! No kidding, FINALLY! I was just talking about this in another thread:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=351599#351599

I'll try it out and give you feedback. Thanks for your effort.

edoc · Posted: Thu 15 Oct 2009, 23:14 Post_subject:

Worked fine for me under Fatdog 112 and Puppy 431RC

Thanks!

technosaurus · Joined: 18 May 2008 Posts: 3845

Recompiled and repacked.
... here is a pet and the dotconfig for reference

a-dub · Joined: 14 Oct 2009 Posts: 8

A quick question: how do you disable automatic connections previously setup with Network Wizard?

Thanks.

BarryK · Posted: Fri 16 Oct 2009, 03:13 Post_subject:

Have a go at compiling it statically with the Qt library. It would be interesting to see how big it becomes.

Usually, if you just remove all the .so files, leave only the .a files, that enough to make it link statically.

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

a-dub, Network Wizard never worked at all for me, so I'm not totally sure. I presume just deleting any saved profiles would do the trick. If it's giving you issues, you can try renaming the /etc/rc.d/rc.network file.

Technosaurus, wanna try the static link thing? Qt applications are not my forte' and I'm still a novice at making pets. The startup script could likely be made a lot more intelligent too. The current one is the simplest implementation that could possibly work.

I think it would not be terribly difficult to make a gtk gui for this, as all the brains are in wpa_supplicant. It uses some kind of control file for communication with the applet. Wpa_supplicant can also use dbus for communication which is how WICD and Connman talk to it.

technosaurus · Joined: 18 May 2008 Posts: 3845

I would have done it already but I am still toying with the idea of having a minimal QT environment in 4.4 CE. I'll do it when I get home tonight.

It does use a lot of resources though...

a-dub · Joined: 14 Oct 2009 Posts: 8

technosaurus · Joined: 18 May 2008 Posts: 3845

well, damn... turns out the devx does not have all the .a files and there is no qt4_dev pet so it looks like I will have to try and recompile qt again because I didn't compile them either when I compiled qt-4.5.3. It takes several hours to compile on my computer so it likely won't be tonight.

technosaurus · Joined: 18 May 2008 Posts: 3845

I compiled it statically against QT-4.5.3... binary ends up being over 8MB

I might have a go at it again though I didn't realize that Qt set static libs to be compiled as PIC, I know it will be smaller but by how much? Probably will still be at least in the 5Mb range so probably better to use the shared version

davesurrey · Joined: 05 Aug 2008 Posts: 1201 Location: UK

Tried to install this to ttuuxxx's pup 214X15 but it didn't run.

From CLI it says it needs

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

I got my copy here:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/pet_packages-4/qt4-4.3.2.pet

davesurrey · Joined: 05 Aug 2008 Posts: 1201 Location: UK

As the pet is nearly 4MB I guess you mean just extract the lib from it.

Many thanks
Dave

jemimah · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 4309 Location: Tampa, FL

Sorry, that's the rub of it. This requires Qt and Qt is rather large. It's possible to configure Wpa_supplicant as a network daemon without the Gui but you'll have to do it by hand editing files and such and you won't have an applet to tell you it's working. Someone might be able to whip up a GTK gui for it, but I couldn't find anything that's already built.