Using OpenVPN from Xfce Desktop Environment

[Worrier Poet]

Please forgive me for reformatting your message. The html was trailing
off to the right when it was included in my reply message.

On 06/23/2012 10:28 AM, Silvio Knizek wrote:
> Hi worrier,
> 
> Xfce doesn't have its own network manager, so you can use anyone you
> want.

Ah, I'm guilty of ass-uming here. It looks as though Wicd is a choice
made by the Xfce package maintainers in the individual distro. I thought
it was a choice made by the Xfce guys.

> To your questions:
> you could set up more virtual interfaces where each one connects to a
> different VPN. Read the debian documentation about how to do this at
> cli level without gui.

Okay, I had just found that while awaiting your reply. I was looking for
love in all the wrong places (bad song). I should have been looking
specifically at the Debian documentation online instead of blog and wiki
entries about VPNs and Xfce.

As to whether or not the CLI method will interact well with Wicd seems
to be a matter of speculation. I've seen some warnings that they don't
play well together. Most of the people I've communicated with about this
so far (directly) don't use any kind of GUI network manager, and
managing VPNs this way seems to work fine for them. But it is kind of
nice to have a GUI network manager when I roam around among more than a
dozen networks whose administrators frequently change what fixed IP they
want me to use. Wicd has been great at that, but it just doesn't do
anything with VPNs.

> If you really want to use network-manager with its native VPN support,
> you should remove wicd and use nm-applet instead as gui. Read the
> debian documentation as well.
> 

Yes, the name "nm-applet" is something that I keep running across when
reading about this, but it isn't listed as a package in the Debian
repositories. I guess it's just something that goes by a different name
in Debian -- probably network-manager-gnome?

I figured I'd have to use one GUI manager or the other, and not both. I
just hoped that Xfce users who use VPNs could comment on the best way to
go about this without installing a lot of Gnome and possibly messing up
my desktop environment.

I thank you very much for your observations!

Good fortune to you!
the worrier