Surely if you have used linux, you would have faced the problem of better networking. Most of the users yell out in forums ” Linux doesn’t detect my wireless card or ethernet card”, “Not able to connect to wireless services, authentication error”, so and so. What this all means is the lack of a better network manager for your machine. Considering the case of Kde network manager, it fails to detect many devices, let me say frankly, it even failed to detect my wifi card. Foraging for a better network manager landed me in Wicd homepage.
Wicd is a nice network manager with a simple interface offering better support for almost all wireless and wired cards. Licensed under GNU, it provides the user with high customization, offering features for running various scripts and services. Wicd offers support for various encryption schemes like WEP, WPA, WPA2, or if necessary you could add your own encryption. Built in drivers for wi-fi and ethernet really does a great job in configuring devices and connecting to the internet. Wicd offers much better host discovery with your card and supports custom ip-addresses and DNS servers in addition to DHCP service. Separate profiles for each network whether it be wired or wireless is possible with wicd. Wicd includes a tray-icon representing the current network activity and status independent of the desktop manager used.
