Wicd (pronounced “Wicked”) is an alternative to the network-manager applet. Although its integration with Gnome is not as nice it seems to work better with WIFI encrypted networks. If you’re having problems with network-manager and you can’t connect to your network you should definitely give Wicd a try.

To install it, remove network manager:

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

Then download and install (by double clicking on it) this deb package: http://wicd.longren.org/pool/feisty/extras/wicd_1.3.1-all.deb

Then open the Control Center from mintMenu and search for “sessions”. In there add a “Wicd” entry and type “/opt/wicd/tray.py”. (You can also remove network-manager from there).

Then reboot…

Upon restart you should see this little icon in your panel:

Click on it to access Wicd:

It’s too early to tell whether Wicd will replace Network-Manager in future releases of Linux Mint. Both projects have improvements to make, whether it’s to do with networking or Gnome integration. The presence of two competing projects in that area is a very good thing though and we should expect wireless connectivity to improve greatly in the months to come.

You can blog from Gnome without going to your blog with a little GTK application called gnome-blog. It’s really easy, it works with most blogs and I’m actually using it right now to post into this wordpress blog hosted on linuxmint.com 🙂

To install it:

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

Then run it from the mintMenu->Internet menu.

The Spanish forums are getting bigger. In fact they’re the largest non-English forums on Linux Mint, both in terms of topics and in terms of posts.

As verdegal pointed out, they needed a moderator and he was quick to recommend Maty1206.

Maty was already known as linuxventanitas, maintainer of one of the two Spanish blogs present on the Linux Mint Planet. He’s now moderator and in charge of the Spanish forums:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4295