Using OpenVPN from Xfce Desktop Environment

[Worrier Poet]

On 06/23/2012 11:19 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On sam., 2012-06-23 at 09:47 -0400, Worrier Poet wrote:
>> 1. Is there a way to have my cake and eat it, too, i.e. can I keep Wicd
>> and handle the VPN connection some other way?
> 
> I would assume so, people were using openVPN before network-manager,
> afaict. Just do the stuff manually.

Okay, so I need to do a little more studying if I want to be able to
keep Wicd.

I had been warned to not do manual OpenVPN configuration while using
Wicd, but I think the warning came from a mental light-weight light me.
His problems were caused by blundering (his own words). I can blunder
around in search of the function, too, if it matters enough to me to
keep Wicd.

>>
>> 2. If I need network-manager, do I need to remove Wicd, and is this
>> going to have an adverse effect upon my desktop environment? (I suppose
>> the Xfce developers chose Wicd as the default for good reason. I thought
>> network-manager was pretty unreliable when I was using it with Gnome,
>> but that was a while ago.)
> 
> Actually, Xfce developers didn't chose Wicd. Debian packagers (we) did
> it, just for the lack of anything else at the time, and because we
> didn't want to pull to much gnome stuff inside the default Debian/Xfce
> environment. Note that if you want to use NM, then nothing prevents you
> of doing so, it's just a default install.
> 

And that's a nice-sounding alternative, because I would like a slightly
less laborious way than manual configuration to change network setups on
the fly. I have to do that a couple of times a day, usually.

Pardon my pressing the point a bit -- you don't think that installing
the network-manager stuff is likely to bring any weirdness into my
beloved Xfce environment? There seem to be a lot of dependencies. I
guess the best way to handle it is to install
network-manager-openvpn-gnome and let it pull in whatever it wants.

Thank you so much for writing!

Good fortune to you!
the worrier