Re: NetworkManager instead of Wicd in ‘%desktop-services’?

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I've been using Network Manager with GNOME for several months at least,
>> and generally I find it works very well, and reconnects much more
>> quickly than wicd.
>
> Good.
>
>> However, there is one annoying bug: every time I reboot the system, the
>> first 1-3 times it connects to the network, name lookups do not work.  I
>> always have to manually ask Network Manager to disconnect, and then
>> reconnect.  Sometimes I have to do this two or three times before name
>> lookups work.  After I've done this, it works perfectly until the next
>> reboot.
>>
>> I looked into this a bit, but haven't yet found the cause.  When name
>> lookups are failing, /etc/resolv.conf exists and is correctly
>> configured.  I've tried restarting 'nscd', but it doesn't help.
>
> Weird.  (I’ve installed GuixSD/GNOME/NM on a laptop that’s almost always
> on a wired network and it doesn’t have this problem AFAIK.)
>
> Could you enable nscd debugging output, so we can at least see whether
> the problem is due to nscd caching name lookup failures?  Something
> like:
>
>        (modify-services %desktop-services
>          (nscd-service-type config
>                             => (nscd-configuration
>                                 (inherit config)
>                                 (debug-level 3)
>                                 (log-file "/var/log/nscd.log"))))

Okay, I'll try that soon.

>>> Now, as someone who doesn’t use GNOME, I wonder if NM would work well
>>> for me.  Last time I tried it’s CLI was too low-level to be usable, and
>>> I don’t remember seeing a curses interface.  Suggestions?
>>
>> There is a curses interface included with Network Manager.  It's called
>> 'nmtui'.  It's not getting built because it depends on 'newt', which is
>> not an input to our Network Manager package.
>
> Nice.  The attached patch adds this dependency, changing the closure
> size from 356 MiB to 360, which I think is reasonable:
>
> diff --git a/gnu/packages/gnome.scm b/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
> index 931c50e9d..d9d3fe793 100644
> --- a/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
> +++ b/gnu/packages/gnome.scm
> @@ -109,6 +109,7 @@
>    #:use-module (gnu packages rdesktop)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages scanner)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages selinux)
> +  #:use-module (gnu packages slang)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages ssh)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages xml)
>    #:use-module (gnu packages gl)
> @@ -4967,6 +4968,7 @@ users.")
>         ("libnl" ,libnl)
>         ("libsoup" ,libsoup)
>         ("modem-manager" ,modem-manager)
> +       ("newt" ,newt)                       ;for the 'nmtui' console 
> interface
>         ("polkit" ,polkit)
>         ("ppp" ,ppp)
>         ("readline" ,readline)
>
>
> OK to apply?

Looks good to me!

     Thanks,
       Mark