Nm-applet

nm-applet is a system tray application to help connect to both wired and wireless networks.

Running as a non-root user: easy way
Add yourself to netdev group:

adduser username netdev

I guess some similar policy exist on almost any system. If this fails, follow the non easy way below.

Running as a non-root user
If one tries to run nm-applet as a non-root user then it will often show no networks, this is because of its security policies. It is possible to run it using "sudo nm-applet", however this will not allow you to autostart it.

To allow the user to run nm-applet on without root privileges the following files need to be edited:

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManagerInfo.conf

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-applet.conf

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-avahi-autoipd.conf

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-dhcp-client.conf

In each file, copy the section of text which starts with and ends with. Paste it immediately below the line, and change the line to your username, i.e., where "fred" is your username.

For example:  

Becomes:    

After this, nm-applet should work when started normally.

Fix error creating/editing new networks due to insufficient provileges
If you cannot create new networks or edit existing ones because of the error "Failed to add new connection: (32) Insufficient privileges", then check this solution.

Autostarting
To autostart nm-applet first add the above changes to the configuration, then add: os.execute("nm-applet &") To the end of your rc.lua file.

nm-applet >= 0.9.4.1-1
The new version of nm-applet requires polkit to be running in background in order to correctly work. add your username to the netdev group

Create a small run_once script as described in the Autostart page (eg: /usr/local/bin/run_once)

pgrep $@ > /dev/null || ($@ &)
 * 1) !/bin/bash
 * 2) Alternative

at the end of the rc.lua add start the gnome polkit daemon and the applet

awful.util.spawn_with_shell("/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1") awful.util.spawn_with_shell("run_once nm-applet")


 * Note
 * The run_once script avoid nm-applet to start twice in case of multi-screen configuration.

Known issue
The network icon is a bit too large to fit in the status bar if it uses the default 8pt font size. Changing the font size to 10pt for example fixes this issue. This is a bug in network-manager, see https://awesome.naquadah.org/bugs/index.php?do=details&task_id=1143&project=1&pagenum=3 for more information.

Alternative to nm-applet
wicd (wicd.sourceforge.net) is an alternative to the gnome network manager and it only gtk dependent. wicd as 3 client front-ends:
 * 1) wicd-cli: a scriptable console client
 * 2) wicd-curses: a Curse client
 * 3) wicd-gtk: a gtk client interface and systray applet.