Some thoughts on connman and wicd

bgstack15 — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 13:14:12 GMT

I discussed these thoughts in the Devuan forum[1] but wanted to publish them on my own site as well. I was a huge fan of wicd, origin site notwithstanding. It met my needs and was easily configurable and understandable. But because it's python2 only (with some experimental python3 work), it was finally dropped from Devuan Ceres. So I had to find an alternative. There's always the unpopular Network Manager. So I checked out connman, which seems to do everything I've asked it to do. It even includes its own gui and trayicon implementation (connman-gtk), but Devuan also provides a separate connman-ui trayicon utility but it duplicates the tray icon feature. So far, to integrate connman into my workflows, I have two major notes.

Disable dns caching

I want /etc/resolv.conf to be the useful file it's always been, and not just point to 127.0.1.1 or some ridiculousness. So run the daemon with -r , by setting file /etc/default/connman.

DAEMON_OPTS="-r"

It's really nice that you can configure this utility in a traditional manner! And it was clearly documented in the man page.

Add xdg autostart etnry

I add file /etc/xdg/autostart/connman-gtk.desktop on all my systems, which is in the xdg autostart directory. And xdg autostart, is, a fd.o specification that describes a common way desktop environments can act in similar ways.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=connman-gtk
Name=Connman Settings
Categories=GTK;GNOME;Settings;X-GNOME-Settings-Panel;X-Unity-Settings-Panel;HardwareSettings
Keywords=connman;network;settings;wired;wifi;wi-fi;bluetooth;vpn;tethering
X-GNOME-Settings-Panel=connman-gtk
X-Unity-Settings-Panel=connman-gtk
Icon=preferences-system-network

Of course, this file has no bearing on non-xdg-compliant window managers, so I also generally add to my user Fluxbox settings (file ~/.fluxbox/startup ) the following line.

/usr/bin/connman-gtk &

Final thoughts

So far I haven't discovered how connman-gtk stores its settings that appear to be per-user, for the "prefer to load straight to tray icon." Oh dear, now that I think about it, it's probably a gsettings or dconf or similar. Say it ain't so!

References

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=24641#p24641

Knowledge Base (Posts about replacement)

Some thoughts on connman and wicd

Disable dns caching

Add xdg autostart etnry

Final thoughts

References