NetworkManager
Network Manager
Network Manager aims for Network Connectivity which "Just Works". The computer should use the wired network connection when its plugged in, but automatically switch to a wireless connection when the user unplugs it and walks away from the desk. Likewise, when the user plugs the computer back in, the computer should switch back to the wired connection. The user should, most times, not even notice that their connection has has been managed for them; they should simply see uninterrupted network connectivity.
More information about Network Manager is available [http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/ here] .
Network-Manager is beta software. You can find packages in [http://packages.ubuntu.com/breezy/net/network-manager breezy/universe]
Installation
Binary Packages
To install the packages make sure you have universe added to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe
Install NetworkManager and it's dependencies by
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install network-manager
Compile from cvs
Get build dependencies and check out networkmanager cvs code by
sudo apt-get build-dep network-manager cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co NetworkManager ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var make sudo make install
Note
Configuring Devices
Devices which are automatically configured on boot will not be available in NetworkManager. To allow network manager to use all of your devices remove instances of auto in /etc/network/interfaces.
Restarting dbus services
NetworkManager is lanuched as a dbus service, thats why you have to restart dbus after installing NetworkManager
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
Gnome
Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions In the Startup Programs tab, click Add type "nm-applet", click OK. log out of your gnome session, and log back in again.
Other Window Managers/Desktop Environments
add nm-applet to your startup
Issues
If nm-applet gives this error message
WARNING **: <WARNING> (): nmwa_dbus_init() could not acquire its service. dbus_bus_acquire_service() says: 'Connection ":1.26" is not allowed to own the service "org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo" due to security policies in the configuration file'
try launching nm-applet with
nm-applet --sm-disable
If it still dosen't work you'd have to edit the dbus-1 configuration files for both NetworkManager and nm-applet (this might be a security compromise, if there's another way to get nm-applet to work, please add it here).
Change the default policy context in both /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf and /etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-applet.conf so it says 'allow' instead of 'deny'.
<policy context="default"> <allow own="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/> <allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/> <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/> </policy>
Then restart dbus
sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart
and launch the applet
nm-applet