Since I don't use GNOME now and try wmii, the nm-applet is no longer available for me.I know there is nmcli for the control. What I'm really interested in is that can it really be a substitute for nm-applet.
man nmcli
, there are these words, which makes me confused:
-
It is not meant as a replacement of nm-applet or other similar clients.
What does other similar clients mean?
-
The use case comprise:
-
Servers, headless machines:No GUI is available; then nmcli is used to talk directly to NetworkManager and control only system-wide connections.
-
User sessions: For this case,
nmcli
can talk tonm-applet
to find user connections.It can still talk directly to NetworkManager for manipulating these connections. Asnmcli
doesn't have direct access to user configuration data in GConf,nm-applet
handles that itself. That may, for example, cause the applet to pop up keyring dialogs when secrets are needed.
As
nmcli
can work directly without X, Why can't it work as well when secrets are needed? -
PS. Is there any alternate easy approach to control connections using command line?
Best Answer
First of all let me say that
nm-applet
can be used in environments other than Gnome: I used it successfully inawesome
and inopenbox
.nmcli
do not provide the same functionalities ofnm-applet
, e.g. you cannot configure new connections.A valid alternative to connect to wired or wireless networks from command line is
wicd-curses
.