NetworkManager and RunLevel 3

[Geoffrey Leach]

I addressed this question to the NetworkManager list and received a 
couple of replies that I found to be quite educational. The topic 
appears on this list occasionally, so I thought it worthwhile to re-
post here.

The essence of what I discovered is that its not NetworkManager but nm-
applet, which is a separate package, albeit from the same source. There 
is an analogous program available for RL 3.

Here's the thread.

Geoffrey Leach <geoff at hughes.net> wrote:

Every so often on the Fedora list, there's a question about running
NetworkManager on Fedora 10 at RunLevel 3, that is where there's no X
windows or desktop running. It's generally acknowledged that at
RunLevel 5 NetworkManager runs like a champ. Furthermore,
it seems that the problem is mostly (always?) where the system relies 
on a wireless connection to a router. So, with all of that in mind, I 
thought I'd ask here and will re-post a summary of replies on the 
Fedora list.

Patryk Zawadzki wrote:

While I'm not a Fedora user, NM should work just fine from any level.
There are two prerequisites however:

1) You need to make sure all the required services are up (hal, dbus)

2) You need some sort of connection provided by:

2.1) An NM client

2.2) A system connection

While 2.1 is currently not possible without using X (there are only 2
clients, one for GNOME and one for KDE) nothing should prevent you
from using a system-level connection. The method of configuring it
depends on loaded plugins (either keyfile config or distro-specific
/etc/ files for interfaces).

Michael Biebl wrote:

There is a project called cnetworkmanager [1], which afaics tries to 
fill exactly this gap.

[1] http://vidner.net/martin/software/cnetworkmanager/
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