Episode: 2594
Title: HPR2594: Using nmtui, the Network Manager Terminal User interface
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2594/hpr2594.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:19:57

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This is HPR episode 2,594 entitled, using an M2I, the network manager terminal user interface.
It is hosted by first-time post-philipp and is about 11 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is a use case for an M2I and general discussion about how to use it.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Well, hello there. My name is Philip and today we're going to be talking about
an M2UI or the network manager terminal user interface.
So this was suggested to me by Klatu and I'm just going to discuss how to use an M2UI and use
cases for an M2UI. It's an anchors base terminal user interface application that lets you control
network manager. It's similar to the network manager applet that allows you to select a Wi-Fi network
or Ethernet network and then it's also similar to the network manager GUI application.
There are several use cases for using the terminal application instead of using the GUI application.
If you prefer a GUI application there is that but the terminal user interface allows you to do a little
bit more. If you have a device that you want to be headless it's really interesting to be able to
use the terminal user interface that way you don't have to install a graphical user interface
to configure the Wi-Fi network on it. Now there are some caveats to that. The Raspberry Pi that I
set up while I was in school could not connect to my network just using NM2UI and that's because
NM2UI does not support WPA to enterprise connections which is kind of difficult because then I
had to set up a graphical user interface and forward the X server over to my laptop but anyway
NM2UI has been around for I don't know how long it's been around for. I can't seem to find
an exact date on when they started including it in the network manager project but it does
several things. It allows you to add and remove connections and it also allows you to
activate and deactivate those connections. The other thing it allows you to do is change
your system's host name which is a really neat feature that I don't know if you can do that
in your graphical user interface. No I don't think you can for a network manager. I don't
think you can do that but when I wanted to set up my Raspberry Pi as a like as a headless
connection or as a headless server I didn't have a keyboard or a monitor to hook it up to so that
made it where it was really difficult to set up anything on the Pi unless I had a serial cable
to connect to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. So I got the serial cable and when I was setting
it up it was very difficult to get set up because there's really no way to get internet on the
thing unless you connect to Wi-Fi or connect a Ethernet cable to it. So what I did was I used NM2UI
to attach an Ethernet cable to the Raspberry Pi and an Ethernet cable to my laptop
and I shared the Wi-Fi connection over Ethernet to the Raspberry Pi and I did this all through
NM2UI. Basically in NM2UI you have a menu that has three options and there's a connection option
and that's what you usually pick and for me there are two sections Ethernet and Wi-Fi
and you can add a connection and if you hit add it gives you a menu with DSL Ethernet
and Finaband Wi-Fi bond bridge IP tunnel team and VLAN. Now I usually select one that I
use often. I haven't really played around with the other ones. I think I did set up a bridge
interface one time and anyway so if you go to Ethernet which is what I'm going to talk about first
you have a profile name so you can name your connection so let's just name this connection Ethernet
one and then the device. The device field is going to be your MAC address
and then it's got another field that you don't have to fill out network manager will take care
of that for you and then it's got IPv4 configuration and IPv6 configuration. Those are both set to
automatic but if you want to share the Ethernet connection like I did with the Pi you're going to
want to open let me see you're going to want to open IPv4 configuration and change that to
shared and hit enter and then you're going to want to open IPv6 configuration and just change that
or keep that automatic sorry don't change that and once you have a specific need where you want to
assign that Raspberry Pi a certain IP address which is easy to do. You can then see that that
connection is going to be listed in your Ethernet connections and you'll just when you want to
activate that connection you'll connect the Ethernet cable to whatever you're connecting it to
and activate and then in the activate list there should be an Ethernet one connection listed and
you can activate and once that's activated the internet connection there should work or whatever
you're connecting it to. In my case the Ethernet connection on my computer was not connected to an
internet like connection it was connected to the Raspberry Pi which allowed me to pull things down
to the Pi like install network manager for instance because it doesn't come with network manager
originally installed and after that on the Pi I would set up a X server so I could get it connected
to the Wi-Fi on campus but then it would have the Wi-Fi listed in NMTUI so I could connect to the
campus Wi-Fi it was already set up. I think NMTUI is supposed to get support for WPA 2 and WPA
Enterprise but as of now I don't think they've added it I'm looking at the change log
and it's not in there yet which I think you can do that in NMCLI which is the command line
interface to network manager and I know you can do that in the GUI interface to network manager
as far as I know I think network manager terminal user interface is at version 1.10
I'm not positive about that at least on my system it's at 1.10 but anyway network manager
terminal user interface also comes with some binaries that allow you to do it like
going through the menus exactly how I said earlier but all you have to do is type in the binary name
so there's NMTUI-edit NMTUI-connect NMTUI-hosting there's a binary for each one of the
menu items that I mentioned earlier and I think from what I can tell you can type in NMTUI
-edit and then you can type in the name of your Wi-Fi access point and it won't configure it
but it will take you to the menu where you can configure that so you don't even have to go
through this little menu that I mentioned earlier which is a nice feature to have it saves
pressing of buttons but that's there just so you know about it and NMTUI-hostname basically
just has one field that you can fill out and that's your hostname field and then you hit okay
and it'll say insufficient privileges because I'm not running it as a root user as a pseudo user
but you can run that and it will change your hostname I'm not sure if you have to reboot
I'm pretty sure you have to reboot for your computer to realize that you changed the hostname
other than that there isn't a lot to talk about network manager terminal user interface
it's pretty it's a pretty cool thing to have and I like using it and you can use it too it's
I don't know if it's installed on both systems but it's definitely easy to find and I would suggest
using it if you don't want to have to use the GUI application all the time because GUI's
are frustrating and I like having this terminal user interface whereas the command line interface
is a little bit more difficult to use if you want to learn how to use it I'd suggest
go listening to the episode of the new world order where class you discusses how to use it
and I'll see you guys next time I'm really happy to be here on hacker public radio and have a great day
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