Airconfig

Sometime last November or December I posted about GUI wireless networking config options for Linux, and I mentioned I was planning on writing one if I couldn’t find one that met my needs (and actually worked).

Well, I went ahead and did it. It’s not finished. There are things that don’t work yet, buttons in the settings window that aren’t connected to anything, and probably a bunch of error conditions I haven’t handled yet. But it’s starting to actually work for me, and I’m going to start actually using it for day-to-day stuff.

I haven’t made any releases yet, but you can grab it from my Subversion repository (warning: sometimes the server decides to go off into the weeds and becomes unreachable). See the website here for download/install information, and do pay careful attention to the requirements list: older versions of the stuff in that list will almost certainly not work. I’m sorry about the high required versions of glib/gtk+, but I’m not going to try to reduce those until the app actually is “finished” and I have some spare time.

Please look at the README as well. There are a few dependencies that are required that probably aren’t already set up properly on your system. (For example, there are only two distros I know of offhand that package wpa_supplicant with the D-Bus control interface compiled in.)

Note that Airconfig is more or less cross-desktop. It doesn’t require any Xfce or GNOME libraries to function. It might not be particularly friendly (in the blending-in sense) for KDE users, as it does use gtk+. (A small exception: xfce4-dev-tools is required, but only for building from SVN. When I make release tarballs, you won’t even need xfce4-dev-tools.) However, currently the GUI stuff is confined to two files, so it wouldn’t be too difficult to write a Qt/KDE frontend (or even a wildly different gtk+ frontend) for it if you don’t mind that it depends on gobject. That’s probably a project for somewhat far in the future, though (I might do it myself; I haven’t touched Qt since 2.x, and it would be fun to re-learn it).

Anyway, give it a look if you’re interested. I’ve added Airconfig to Xfce Bugzilla, so feel free to report problems there (I greatly prefer that instead of email). I may not get to your bug for a while since there’s still a lot to do.