Eduroam is not so Wicd

October 10, 2013
Internet - Linux - Ugh

Yeah, the title of the post is a terrible pun. I’m very sorry!

Recently, Wicd, a network connection manager for Linux, has not worked very well with Eduroam, a wifi service on many university campuses around the world. I have no idea why either! The last time I was in school (so rewind six months ago or so) it was working perfectly fine! The reason why I am using Wicd is because Network Manager was terrible.

Anyways, Wicd doesn’t have any problems connecting to Eduroam. But when it does, it so so goddamn slow I want to throw my laptop outside a window and do the hokey pokey – cause I’m mad and that’s what it’s all about (lolz). By the way, I’m using PEAP with GTC.

It’s not Eduroam’s fault – I see other people in my lectures procrastinating on Facebook or Reddit with no problem whatsoever. So it was reasonable to suspect that the config files for Wicd on my machine was the culprit. As a result, I deleted the config files and reinstalled Wicd.

Sadly, nothing really changed. I tried setting the recommended template from the ArchWiki, but again no luck. It worked, but it was still slow as fuck. I stumbled upon a page from by a UWaterloo student. It also worked, but again there weren’t any noticeable differences. Same with the package “eduroam-wicd” in the Arch repository!

I know what you might be thinking: maybe your wireless card is crap? It’s not, I can connect perfectly fine to another wifi hotspots. Hell, I get a faster connection to Second Cup’s guest wifi than I do with Eduroam.

Ok, this rant is over.

EDIT on 10/11/13: A friend suggested that the wireless card may be going into power saving mode which could drop the connection. This article in the ArchWiki is helpful. I’ll update this post once I test with Eduroam again!

EDIT on 10/12/13: No drastic changes were made when I turned off power saving mode in my wireless card! Another friend (yay I have so many friends) is experiencing this issue to with Network Manager in Ubuntu. So we basically concluded that it might be a drivers issue. Maybe Eduroam upgraded or something? Ahh #linuxproblems.

Be bold, take flight — tryangles!