After installing Fedora 29 with i3 window manager, we need to install many other programs that will ease our user experience.
The first problem we have to solve is how are we going to connect to Internet, you might have noticed that we don't have any program or applet that allows us to activate the Wi-Fi card or even the NetworkManager service to use the wired wetwork card or manage the different networks that are within our reach.
Assuming that you are already logged in and that your hardware is supported by Fedora, the wireless network card should be activated, but how do we connect to any of the networks we have available?
nmcli
In the previous post we installed a set of packages provided by the group "Hardware Support", this group provides support for a wide variety of networking hardware. We also install the group of packages corresponding to NetworkManager.
nmcli is a command-line program that will allow us to activate by software the network hardware of our device, scan the networks that are around us and connect to them.
We will need a terminal, by pressing <Start> + <Enter> we get a Terminal.
If our device has a switch that allows to activate or deactivate the network card, we make sure it is activated.
Then on the terminal we execute the following command to verify that it is already activated by software:
nmcli networking on
This should activate the wired network connection of our device in case we were accessing one and we wanted to use it.
To activate the wireless network hardware from the terminal, we execute the following command:
nmcli radio wifi on
This should activate our network card, then we verify which are the networks that we have available at our reach:
nmcli device wifi list
IN-USE SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY
RED_WIFI_2 Infra 5 130 Mbit/s 100 ▂▄▆█ WPA2
RED_WIFI_2 Infra 1 130 Mbit/s 29 ▂___ WPA2
RED_WIFI_3 Infra 1 54 Mbit/s 17 ▂___ WPA1
In case you need to scan again to verify other connections:
nmcli device wifi rescan
Assuming that RED_WIFI_1 does not require an access password, to get connected we just execute the following command:
nmcli device wifi connect RED_WIFI_1
In case that we might need to provide a password:
nmcli device wifi connect RED_WIFI_1 password "1234567890"
Where:
connect is the task we want to accomplish.
RED_WIFI_1 this argument tells the network we want to get connected.
password a parameter that tells we are going to provide a password to get authenticated.
1234567890 this is the argument passed for the previous parameter, the password of the nextwork. Here you must provided the password that works for you.
By now, you should be connected to the network. Now proceed to install any other program that will help you to ease you user experience with i3.
Networks
mn-applet
nm-applet is a very simple applet for NetworkManager that allows us to do in a very easy and intuitive way what we did with nmcli, but in a graphical way.
su -c 'dnf install nm-applet'
To run nm-applet press <Start> + <d> and type nm-applet and press <Enter>. In the lower right corner of our screen should appear an icon corresponding to this applet from where we can manage our connection to the different networks that we have available to around us.
NetworkManager-tui
This is an alternative for nm-applet that make use of ncurses to create a very friendly Text User Interface.
su -c 'dnf install NetworkManager-tui'
nm-connecion-editor
NetworkManager Connection Editor allows us to edit in a friendly way and intuitively the different networks to which we have accessed, or Well, create Hotspots in case our network card supports it.
su -c 'dnf install nm-connection-editor'
Terminal Emulator
You may have noticed that the emulator that is installed by default with i3 is rxvt-unicode and that is not very friendly to say, it is not very intuitive to first sight and it has a certain learning curve that we do not want to go through, possibly...
Ironically, my favorite terminal emulator is GNOME Terminal, you can install the one you prefer.
su -c 'dnf install gnome-terminal'
i3 has the key combination <Start> + <Enter> assigned to the emulator urxvt, to launch GNOME Terminal instead, you need to edit the configuration file for i3 (~/.config/i3/config), look for the line:
bindsym $mod+Return exec i3-sensible-terminal
And replace with the command that calls our terminal emulator, in my case, gnome-terminal:
bindsym $mod+Return exec gnome-terminal
In the following post I will share what other programs I use in my setup Fedora 29 with i3wm. At the moment you already have the necessary to install other interesting programs such as Web browser and others.