Episode: 1363
Title: HPR1363: Some pacman Tips By Way of Repacing NetworkManager With WICD
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1363/hpr1363.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:15:49

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Howdy folks, this is 5150 for Hacker Public Radio.
This is going to be my second installment on my, so it just installed Arch Linux.
Now what?
Lessons from a newbie series.
And really, I've repaired these notes after I've recorded episode one, I thought they
were perfect and I was going to insert them in middle of episode one.
Okay, here's some extra stuff about Pac-Man, but then I realized, okay, if I not only
incorporated some lessons of Pac-Man I'd learned and actually re-learned, if I also talked
about my reasons why I was doing it, even though it's pretty much part of it's going
to be a summarization of the Archwicky, I could make another whole episode and thus make
Ken Fallon happy.
So this is my purpose today, and so my little business laptop that I use for my excursions,
my customers is the one on Arch, so I think we can think that laughable.
I used to pre-configure a router for a customer, so I ended up on chains that I'd be raised
to his network.
It's set for, well, I was also setting it up as just a wireless access point, not as a router
because he's already got a router on network.
And since that router's down in the basement, and I'm one of this on his ground levelers
offices, I could really want to replace the router that he had.
I just wanted to set up P, so the best routers I think out there right now are the Buffalo
routers running DDWRT already, so that's what I bought for him.
So long story, well, too late to make long story short, of course, to configure the router
I had to set up the ethernet port on my laptop, on the same IP range as the router is from
factory.
And I should have used command-line tools to do it, instead I got in a hurry, so I just
clicked on the network manager graph tool, comes with, I'm assuming this is the general
tool chips of all versions of Arsian Linux, it's network manager, it's post-wigit, or
something else, but it's definitely what came with CINARCH, of course, which became
antergos, but I didn't have any trouble getting in it, setting up static IP on the same
range as the router.
The trouble was when I tried to, I got done, and I tried to set it back to DHCP, the
DDWRT, and I could round around, and eventually I did resort to my own tools to reset my
IP.
And the trouble of that is, I'll go all down with that, well, I'm back up to, and people
have listened to me before, know that here in the house, I am behind two neted routers
between my ISP.
My ISP comes in through wireless link to an outbuilding, because there are too many trees
around the house, and now building is on the edge of the property, so I've got a router
out there, and of course, it sets up a neted network locally, and then I have two
four gigahertz wireless link between there in the house, and the house I have a network
bridge, and then coming out of the network bridge, it goes into another router, which sets
up another neted network on a different address range force here in the house.
Okay, well, probably I should have seen this, but my outside router, out in the outbuild
first router, closest to the internet, it set up on the range, 192.168.0.X, and that's
the same range, of course, as this Buffalo router defaults to.
So I'd set up my laptop to a static IP on the Ethernet port to 192.168.0.100, so I could
talk to the router.
All of a sudden, like I said, I set it back to DHCP, thought it was done, then I went
to SSH in my server, which is on the outside now, because it is an actual rack server, and
it is incredibly loud, and the first time I fired up, I realized I could not keep the
blast thing in the house, so it's out in the outbuilding on that outside network, and
blow them behold, I try to SSH into it, and it says, you know, a host on reachables, you
know, through 192.168.0.100, so I've got this phantom network connection to 192.168.0.100,
it doesn't actually exist, and that's what was, that was what was keeping me from connecting
to my server.
It length I did find a workaround, basically what I had to do was first set E-C-R-O,
yeah, well I set a batch file, or batch file, so you're talking about this here, I set
a shell script to set E-C-R-O to 0.0.0 and ask .2.0.0, then I stopped and then restarted
DHCP CD on E-C-R-O, and boom, you know, that cleared out the phantom adapter and I connect.
The other thing I'm not even sure it's related, I was back to the same customer, same laptop,
and doing some work, and I was connected to their Wi-Fi on, of course, on the wireless like
I'd set up, and it was just horrible, and the problem I was on E-C-R-O, so it really shouldn't
be in that, and it was just, it can actually kept dropping, the speed was horrible compared to
the wired Windows laptop that I was trying to set right next to it, I was trying to fix it,
because I was trying to use my laptop because there was some malware on Windows laptop,
and I wasn't sure if I did, and the malware was doing pop-ups to send to, if you did a search,
it would send you to sites, it selected a question of value, so the diagnosis problem on the laptop,
on the desktop that I was working on, I didn't trust the browsers, of course, that were on there,
so I won a separate sheet, but it was just almost unusable that day, so I thought all around,
I wanted a replacement network manager with Wicked, okay, but I didn't install Wicked right after
I got home from customer, it was a whole couple weeks later, maybe, that in the laptop set,
I hadn't used it in tween, it set the case, well, it's set on the charge, but I hadn't used it
a while, and before I had started anything, of course, the first step was to update our clinics
on the laptop, and let me talk a little bit about, for those initiated, the Pac-Man is the
package manager, and for Arch Linux, in other words, it's equivalent to apt-get, and a Debbie
entering to system, or a yum in a fedora box, and I'm not sure if this is normal for Arch,
I've got pseudo on a Synarch, well, in a DOS box, so I don't have to pre-go in and log in as
root before I do everything, so I'm not sure if that's normal for Arch or not, but just to do the
basic strokes for Pac-Man, the issue, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash, uppercase, space, and then
a package name that installs the pitch from standard repos, again, it's more or less equivalent to
pseudo, space, app, dash, get, dash, sorry, space, install, space, package name. Now, capital S,
option with, I'm sorry, the capital S operator can take, well, there's several options that
gulfs capital S operator, but two of them are dash Y, which refreshes the master package list,
and dash U, which updates all of the packages, so if you were to issue pseudo, pseudo, space,
Pac-Man, space, dash, capital S, lowercase U, lowercase Y, actually, I don't think it makes
any difference, but most of the dash, capital S, lowercase Y, lowercase U, is equivalent to
demi-instruction, pseudo, space, app, dash, get, space, update, followed by the instruction, pseudo,
space, app, dash, get, space, upgrade, per safe upgrade, it's, I'm not sure which app, which
one it is, one of mine, you go to derive versions, actually, it doesn't take the space, dash,
upgrade, the old just plain old upgrade option. The thing is, you can combine this with package
installation, so if you do, pseudo, Pac-Man, I'm sorry, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash,
uppercase U, lowercase Y, sorry, let me start over, I did a dev random tonight, and I'm still
drinking beer, that's why. Okay, start over, if you issue, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash,
uppercase S, lowercase Y, lowercase U, space, package name, one, space, package name, two,
etcetera, that would first update the system and then install the select packages, so yeah,
that's incredibly neat, do everything all in one line. Okay, coming to some of the special cases,
it's probably by slow internet, but first time, a few of the update packages, well, the, the,
the repos all updated, but about 70 packages needed updating in about three, timed out without
downloading, so nothing was installed. The second time through, even one of the repos didn't refresh,
now I just think this is a connectivity problem, so I kept trying to same update command over and
over, it was, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash, uppercase Y, sorry, beer again, oh, pseudo, space,
Pac-Man, space, dash, uppercase S, lowercase Y, lowercase U, and I tried that two or three times
in a row, one thing or another would either one of the repos wouldn't update or package wouldn't
update, so the whole thing failed. Finally, I listed the help Google and found out, watch for the
second time I've had, I'll get to that. If you issue, pseudo, Pac, space, Pac-Man, space, dash,
uppercase S, lowercase Y, lowercase Y, that forces a refresh of all package lists, quote, even if
they appear to be up to date. It was important because this seems to unimaginably fix all the
timeout connectivity problems, and after issuing, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash, uppercase S,
lowercase Y, lowercase Y, that next time I ran the update, pseudo, space, Pac-Man, space,
dash, uppercase S, lowercase Y, lowercase U, it complete without any complaint, and the thing
is I was mad at myself, I said this is the second time around, this happened to me about six
months ago, and I completely forgot, when I saw all the S, Y, Y, I hit myself on the head for a
bit of dummy because I've gone through this once before, and just totally forgot about. So,
one tip, podcasting your errors is a great way of sending them in memories so you don't forget
about them. Okay, about the same time I ran out of space of my 10 gig group partition.
Okay, let me go back, friend of mine, last weekend, talked about how he was at a conference,
and was trying to do updates on his arch installation, and couldn't complete at all kinds of
connectivity problems. I bet this was it, I bet if he had done Pac-Man, dash, capital S, Y, Y,
it would have fixed him right up, because he finally blew away the system and reinstalled the
distro. Okay, but some time during all of this, I ran out of space of my 10 gig group partition,
you know, and I just got some Peter 64 then a day, I would affect 10 gig to be planning,
because he ran the same thing, and he fixed it with some database problems that, you know,
reduced some unneeded stuff in my SQL. Well, I don't know if this would have it,
would have helped him or not. I found out this command, sudo, space, Pac-Man, space, dash,
capital S, lowercase C, please packages that are no longer installed from the Pac-Man cache,
as well as currently unused sync databases to free up to space. I issued that command,
I got three gig back in my repetition. Doesn't mean I shouldn't go back some time and adjust space
between root and my home partition, but for right now I'm good. Now sudo, space, Pac-Man,
space, dash, S, lowercase C, lowercase C removes all files from the cache. So there, what this is,
it's our rollback cache for your installed packages, if you decide, you know, you've done an
upgrade upgrade, and it breaks something that gets cached so that you can go back on a package by
a package basis. So as I understand it, the dash S C cleans out packages that you no longer
have installed, or have been superseded by something else, and then the dash S C C just removes
everything, you know, all older versions of packages installed on your system. So this is my
takeaway that I want people to remember from this, whether you're an arch user or not, because I
think if you're not an arch user at some point, you're going to want to test yourself by playing
around an arch, that the, if you try and update your system and it seems like you can't get a good
connection to the server, try the Pac-Man underscore dash uppercase S, lowercase Y, lowercase Y,
so if that doesn't fix everything up automatically. Secondly, if you're running out of space on
your reproduction, then the solution very well could be Pac-Man, space, dash, uppercase S,
lowercase C, and if you're desperate, lower, dash uppercase S, lowercase C, lowercase C,
double C, and see if that doesn't clear you get you some room. Okay, now the rest of this is going
to be how I replaced Pac-Manager with Wicked on my system, and this is straight out of the arch
Wicked, and on that it's just wiki.archlinics.org slash index.php slash uppercase W, lowercase
I, lowercase C, lowercase D. All right, so you just use Pac-Man, you install the package WICD,
if you want a graphical front end, you would want, if you're using, no, you would also install
WICD-GTK, and if you're running KDE, you can find WICD-KDE, and there you are. You want
network notifications, you want to install notification dash Daemon, or if you're not, if you're not
using those, you may want to try the smaller XFCE4-NOTIFYD. Now, see, and I've done this, if we
weren't Ubuntu, doing AppGet install Wicked would make that your default network manager.
However, arch makes no such assumptions. You have to tell it everything that you want to do,
so we have, so we have to do is shut down your current network managers and keep them from
restarting a startup while enabling WICD and installing it to start up by default from startup.
First thing you need to do, stop all the previously running network dates.
If you listed those in the show notes, but common ones, this is from Archwiki, are NetCTL,
and that's CFGDHCPCD, and network manager, NetManager, the N, and the N, as the beginning of the
words, are capitalized. You probably won't have all of them running, but go drop down to terminal,
and for sake argument, let's go ahead and come root, some have to start, every command to
do. So the first thing you want you'd want to do to stop the running Daemon's is system CTL
space, stop, and then the package name. So you put all those packages in that I mentioned
in and turn, and you probably don't have all of all running. So system CTL, stop, NetCTL,
system stop, CTL, NetConfig, system stop, CTL, DHCPCD, and system stop, CTL, network manager.
Then we have to disable those so they don't conflict wicked on reboots. You don't want them
coming up again when reboot because you're going to have wicked running. So in this case,
it's system CTL space disabled, and then the package name. So again, go through those ones I
talked about, NetCTL, NetConfig, DHCPCD, and network manager. You want to make sure you're
logged in as an user's group. It should be, if you have root, you know, rights to kind of root,
but that is GPSSWDspace-A, space your username, space users. All right, next thing, next thing,
we've got wicked installed, we've got to initialize it. So it's system CTL, space, start, space,
WICD.Service. And if you want to bring up the client right away, graphical client,
type on the online, WICD-client. Finally, you need to enable the wicked.Service to load
it next boot up. So it's system CTL, space, enable, space, WICD.Service. Okay, I hope you found
this of interest. I've certainly found it interesting, explaining it to you. I've been your host,
5150, for AcroPublic Radio. Can view my contact information at the bigredswitch.frugans.com.
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