Managing wireless settings: WICD

Hi folks, I had some wrangling with my new laptop I setup for testing 3.0 beta 3. Specifically the wireless setup and then to find a decent system for managing wireless connections as the included options are not the best. I posted elsewhere about fixing the settings for my wireless device an Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG chipset requiring some ucode from the Intel/linux site to work at all. That aside, once I got the wireless working I wanted to bop around town and get connected in various places. As you know beta 3 comes with Network-Manager installed which is not very reliable and does not provide much info for scanning networks to connect to. Sometimes for me it would crash requiring a reboot. Looking around a fair amount of people like WICD which is a replacement for Network-Manager. It shows much more info, supports automatic connections, and will connect before the desktop is fully loaded making you immediately online. Sounds great but I had problems with it only working at home! Once at a coffee shop it would connect and then wait interminably to recieve an IP address. Which never comes. Eventually I was able to solve this problem with 2 things: First, to delete the additional lines in /etc/network/interfaces which is mentioned at the link below. Second, I switched the DHCP system from dhclient to dhcpcd. This can be done from synaptic and then in the WICD prefs, you can select which DHCP client to use though they recommend (auto). Anyhow, maybe some people will prefer to use WICD over Network Manager, with dhcpcd. jonathan adams leonard http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php