I’ve been struggling with fixing a nasty error with wicd network manager for about 2 hours.
The exact error message I faced was:
Connection Failed: Bad Password
The issue occured after some suggested updates from the Ubuntu graphical update tool.
The wireless network to which it was connected was a WPA-PSK (WPA2) Passphrase authentication.
The network key was properly typed in and was working well on another system so the error Connection Failed: Bad Password made no sense.
There was nothing unusual in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log , that made me even more curious about what might be causing the error.After a lot of try outs and a lot of readings and tests I finally got the cause of the weird Bad Password errors produced by wicd
Weirdly enought, somehow the Ubuntu package update tool has installed the default gnome network-manager package.
The installed network-manager package has mismatched somehow the way wicd connects to wireless networks and as a cause the wpa_supplicant binary was not properly invoked.
As a consequence of the network-manager being present on the system the wpa_supplicant process which made the exact connection to the wireless network was not launching in, the exact wpa_supplicant invocation missing was:
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /var/lib/wicd/configurations/0022b0aa424a -D wext
Luckily the solution to the notebook wireless device unable to connect to the Wireless network was simple.
All I had to do is completely remove all occurance of network-manager packages installed on the Ubuntu system, by issuing the commands:
ubuntu:~# apt-get remove --yes network-manager
ubuntu:~# dpkg --purge network-manager-pptp-gnome network-manager-pptp network-manager
The reason for issuing the a dpkg –purge command was my desire to completely get rid of all kind of network-manager related configurations.
Now after re-connecting with wicd wireless manager, it worked fine 😉