Networking without Network Manager

I wanted to remove everything stupid. So I did. And it is beautiful. The most stupid things were: avahi-daemon - Bonjour shit, apparmor annoying quasi-protection, and cups - have I ever printed anything?.

sudo update-rc.d avahi-daemon disable
sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon stop
sudo update-rc.d -f avahi-daemon remove
sudo apt-get purge -y avahi-daemon avahi-utils

sudo update-rc.d apparmor disable
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor stop
sudo update-rc.d -f apparmor remove
sudo apt-get purge -y apparmor

sudo update-rc.d cups disable
sudo /etc/init.d/cups stop
sudo update-rc.d -f cups remove
sudo apt-get purge -y cups

I love it.

Wired

Setup wired networking. The most important thing is /etc/network/interfaces file. It should look like this:

# interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface, with DHCP
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

# Wireless, with DHCP as usual
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
    wpa-ssid "Konstantin Colovic"
    wpa-psk "m1cotaki5"

To reload wired network, just type:

sudo ifdown eth0 && sudo ifup eth0

WiFi

Detect wireless adapter with iwconfig and list available networks with iwlist scan.

List blocked WiFi cards with rfkill list. I needed to unblock mine, so i typed sudo rfkill unblock 1. It worked. So I started my WiFi with sudo ifdown wlan0 && sudo ifup wlan0.

rfkill is a small tool to query the state of the rfkill switches, buttons and subsystem interfaces.

GUI for WiFi

ceni is a network manager in console, and it’s perfect. Another one - wpa_gui is in default repositories, but it works only in cojuction with wpa_supplicant.

wpa_supplicant is a daemon and acts as the backend component controlling the wireless connection. wpa_supplicant supports separate frontend programs and a text-based frontend (wpa_cli) and a GUI (wpa_gui) are included with wpa_supplicant. If you are using wpa_cupplicant, interesting is to check what is happening with wpa_cli command.

I will install and use Ceni as my preffered GUI:

echo "deb ftp://ftp.spline.de/pub/aptosid/debian/ sid main fix.main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/aptosid.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ceni
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/aptosid.list

Source of information, mostly this: HowTo: Connect WiFi Networks