- NetworkManager
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Network Manager 
The default NetworkManager applet for GnomeOriginal author(s) Red Hat Stable release 0.9.0 / August 23, 2011 Preview release 0.8.5.92 / September 14, 2011 Written in C with GObject Operating system Unix-like Platform D-bus Type Network management License GNU GPL Website http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ Network Manager is a software utility aimed at simplifying the use of computer networks on Linux-based and other Unix-like operating systems.
Contents
Overview
Red Hat initiated a NetworkManager project in 2004 with the goal of enabling Linux users to deal more easily with modern networking needs, particularly wireless networking. NetworkManager takes an opportunistic approach to network selection, attempting to use the best available connection as outages occur, or as the user roams between wireless networks. It prefers Ethernet connections over “known” wireless networks, which are preferred over wireless networks with SSIDs to which the user has never connected. The user is prompted for WEP or WPA keys as needed.
The NetworkManager project was among the first major Linux desktop components to utilize D-Bus and HAL extensively. Since June 2009, however, NetworkManager no longer depends on HAL.
NetworkManager has two components:
- a service which manages connections and reports network changes
- a graphical desktop applet which allows the user to manipulate network connections. The nmcli applet provides similar functionality on the command line.
Both components are intended by the developers to be reasonably portable, and the applet is available to desktop environments which implement the Freedesktop.org System Tray Protocol, including GNOME, KDE Plasma Workspaces, Enlightenment (window manager) and Xfce. As the components communicate via D-Bus, applications can be written to be “link-aware”, or to replace the provided applet entirely. One example is KNetworkManager, a KDE frontend to NetworkManager developed by Novell for SUSE Linux.
Mobile broadband configuration assistant
Antti Kaijanmäki announced the development of a mobile broadband configuration assistant for NetworkManager in April 2008[1] it became available in NetworkManager version 0.7.0. Together with the package mobile-broadband-provider-info the connection is easily configured.
User interfaces
- NetworkManagement
- Network Manager back-end for KDE SC 4, provides a plasma widget frontend.[2]
- KNetworkManager
- the K Desktop Environment 3 frontend developed by Novell.[3]
- nm-applet
- is the GNOME applet for NetworkManager.
- nmcli
- built-in command line interface (added in 2010[4] e.g. in Fedora 13 Alpha,[5] which was released in late May 2010).
- cnetworkmanager
- command line interface for NetworkManager.[6]
See also
- Wireless tools for Linux for command-line interface
- BlueZ
- GNOME Keyring Manager
- UMTSMON [7]
- usbserial
- Wicd Network Manager
- wvdial
References
- ^ Announce on networkmanager-list
- ^ NetworkManagement GIT
- ^ KNetworkManager documentation
- ^ Initial pieces of nmcli, gitweb
- ^ Features/NetworkManagerCmdline - FedoraProject wiki, Fedora 13 Alpha release notes - FedoraProject wiki
- ^ cnetworkmanager - Command Line Interface for NetworkManager
- ^ http://umtsmon.sourceforge.net/
External links
Categories:- Free network-related software
- Applications using D-Bus
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