Installing wicd

If you find that you don't like the default network manager in Debian, you may want to check out some of your other options for managing your network connections. I have found that I like to use wicd: it seems to do a better job at handling wireless network connections than the default network manager. Before we can do the installation, we'll want to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://apt.wicd.net lenny extras

To do this, you'll want to either open the file in your favourite text editor or use the echo command:

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Or:

# gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Or:

# echo "deb http://apt.wicd.net lenny extras" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Next, we want to add the key for the wicd repositories:

# wget -q http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg -O- | apt-key add -

Now we are ready to install wicd from our newly added repository:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install wicd

That's really all there is to installing wicd. During the installation, it will actually remove the default network manager and will set wicd to start up on boot up. See you next time.