# Port Request: wicd-curses



## user5813 (Oct 31, 2011)

I have googled this and found nothing on it. I (like many) use a laptop and need to connect to multiple wireless networks and in FreeBSD, options are limited. Wifimgr is one but requires gtk and doesn't always work the way it should (sometimes it ignores rc.conf at startup for me) and manually configuring with ifconfig can get old when having to do it four or five times a day. Wicd-curses runs in a terminal and is very very simple to use. It is especially convenient when running a tiled window manager. I can't imagine porting to be terribly difficult. It is made up of two parts (daemon for root level and a user interface) and highly configurable. It also uses dbus to communicate. If I had any C or other programming knowledge at all I would do this myself.


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## ondra_knezour (Nov 1, 2011)

Not reply to your question/request at all, but in case you are using couple of same wireless networks most of time, wpa_supplicant.conf(5) may be reading of your interest.


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## wblock@ (Nov 1, 2011)

user5813 said:
			
		

> I have googled this and found nothing on it. I (like many) use a laptop and need to connect to multiple wireless networks and in FreeBSD, options are limited. Wifimgr is one but requires gtk and doesn't always work the way it should (sometimes it ignores rc.conf at startup for me) and manually configuring with ifconfig can get old when having to do it four or five times a day. Wicd-curses runs in a terminal and is very very simple to use. It is especially convenient when running a tiled window manager. I can't imagine porting to be terribly difficult. It is made up of two parts (daemon for root level and a user interface) and highly configurable. It also uses dbus to communicate. If I had any c or other programming knowledge at all I would do this myself.



Check out the Quick Porting section of the Porter's Handbook.  It doesn't need to be terribly involved.  It helps to find a similar port to use as an example.  Maybe search for "curses" in ports Makefiles?


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## user5813 (Nov 1, 2011)

Thanks for your reply. 
I thought about this and was wondering: "How do I know this will work?" I am very new to BSD so I apologize. Am I supposed to download a binary file and attempt to compile it under FreeBSD and see if it works before I attempt to port it? As in, attempt to compile on my box and then attempt to resolve any errors myself? Or, should I attempt to run it under the linux binary support? I really don't know where to begin here.


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## wblock@ (Nov 1, 2011)

Having looked at this a bit more, wicd-curses is just a part of wicd.

It seems like various people have mentioned porting wicd before.  A little surprising it isn't in ports already.  You might ask in the freebsd-ports mailing list to see if someone already has a semi-functional version.

The first step is downloading the wicd tarfile; wicd-curses is a part of it.  Looks like it's all Python.  INSTALL talks about requirements, which translates directly to port USE_PYTHON, RUN_DEPENDS, and BUILD_DEPENDS settings.  The work of porting is getting it to build, and then getting it to run.  Building is probably not too hard.  To run, wicd's use of Linux wireless tools like iwconfig will have to be adjusted to the FreeBSD equivalents in ifconfig(8).

So the good news is that wicd-curses looks pretty easy, but the bad news is that wicd itself has to be ported to get wicd-curses.


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## user5813 (Nov 1, 2011)

Awesome! This is a great place to start. I will check the mailing lists and tinker around with it to see what I can do. Thank you very much.


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## zeroseven (Nov 8, 2011)

I'm actually really interested in helping with this, the port that is... Have you made any progress?


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