wicd almost connects

[danboston]

I've installed wicd. As per the wiki I stopped dhcpcd. I rebooted. I saw a wicd icon in the tool tray. Good. I clicked on it. It showed the ether net ("wired") network but clicking "connect" resulted in a long wait followed by ... nothing. "Obtaining IP address" is what was displayed during the long wait. Going to a shell and pinging various sites indicates that wicd never actually connected.

I tried again, this time, picking from the various wifi networks available. I clicked on one. Entered the password. After a long wait ... nothing. Same as with wired. "validating authentication" is what is displayed during the long wait.

Now what is interesting is that wicd must be *almost* working, because the nearby wifi networks are shown. The question is, how do I nudge wicd past that "almost" and to an actual successful connection?

[The Doctor]

The unix way is to design one thing to do one job well. The problem isn't wicd but one of the tools it is tying to use. Wicd is just a thing to look nice and manage the low level tools for you.

Lets start by looking at the entire picture. Please post the output of rc-update (Assuming you are running openRC and not systemd) and rc-service dhcpcd status. The most likely cause is dhcpcd already running and blocking itself.

Another good troubleshooting step would be to try a static ip address. This requires a little understanding of the network you are trying to connect to. In general, your router (or gateway) will be 192.168.{0,1}.{1,254}. The netmask should atuocomplete to 255.255.225.0. and your ip will be the same as the gateway except the last number. Choose between 1-254 so long as it is unique. The DNS domain can be either the same as the gateway or 8.8.8.8 to use google. Either should be satisfactory.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[danboston]

Thank you, doctor.

An "rc-update" run resulted in this output:

[Jaglover]

SOHO routers do not care, they will connect you if you grab a static IP, wired or wireless.
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My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[The Doctor]

Yep, the run levels look good. So much for that hypothesis. The static IP should work fine. Generally, I actually prefer them since it makes ssh and ntfs work reliably.

Wicd has several options under preferences. I would make sure it is tying to use dhcpcd and the rest on automatic. For advanced settings the driver wext and the external backend. You can play with the driver as that is a bit card dependent, but I wouldn't expect much. Wext is pretty much standard.

The next suspect is firmware. You should make sure you have sys-kernel/linux-firmware installed and your wireless card driver built as a module. You also need to ensure that the two cfg80211 options are set in the kernel.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[danboston]

[The Doctor]

The service which automatically seeks out and connects needs to be disabled. However both wicd and networkmanager use dhcpcd to aquire an ip. Wicd and networkmanager are both just GUI shells that doen't do anything network related. They just run the tools that do the networking.

If networkmanager works and wicd doesn't the culprit is likely the driver under advanced settings in the preferences.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[danboston]

Before reading your post I had the realization that I had uninstalled dhcpcd in order to keep it out of wicd's way.

Woops.

I reinstalled it. Dhcp is in but is not started by the init script(s). Now the situation is as follows.

One: if the computer reboots, wired access works.

Two: if an attempt is made to switch to wifi, the nearby networks will be shown, but connecting will always fail.

Three: after two, attempting to return to wired connection will
always fail. (reboot time).

I've got wicd working on another distro on this same computer so I had the idea of looking at the various configuration files. At this time, the files for dhcp and wicd match, aside from the different interface names.

The only conclusion is that wicd and dhcp are working correctly... yet it's not working right.

Here is the wicd log from the most recent attempt:

[charles17]

[NeddySeagoon]

danboston,

As The Doctor hints at, there is no point in trying to use a pretty GUI until it works manually.
The GUI will just hide the error messages we need for debugging.

You may have exactly one tool managing your network connections. If you have more, they fight and nothing works.
You will need dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant installed, all the tools use them.
wpa_supplicant is a one of a kind tool but there are various implementations of dhcpcd.

Step one is to get your system into a state where none of the following are started by default

• Any Wireless GUI
  
• dhcpcd
  
• wpa_supplicant

When you boot this way, none of your interfaces will get an IP address, not even a 169.x.x.x link local address, except lo.
Until you get to this state, something is trying to manage networking. You need to locate it and stop it.

Once you get here,

[danboston]

In the end, i realized I was using the wrong approach. It was time to conceptually zoom out or step back and view the situation.

1. If I install wicd, it does not work.
2. If I install network manager, it does work.

Right. Use the program that works. Problem solved.