The default NetworkManager applet for Gnome |
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| Original author(s) | Red Hat |
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| Stable release | 0.9.2 / November 10, 2011 |
| Preview release | 0.8.5.92 / September 14, 2011 |
| Written in | C with GObject |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Platform | D-bus |
| Type | Network management |
| License | GNU GPL |
| Website | http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ |
NetworkManager is a software utility aimed at simplifying the use of computer networks on Linux-based and other Unix-like operating systems.
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Red Hat initiated a NetworkManager project in 2004 with the goal of enabling Linux users to deal more easily with modern networking needs, particularly wireless networking. NetworkManager takes an opportunistic approach to network selection, attempting to use the best available connection as outages occur, or as the user roams between wireless networks. It prefers Ethernet connections over “known” wireless networks, which are preferred over wireless networks with SSIDs to which the user has never connected. The user is prompted for WEP or WPA keys as needed.
The NetworkManager project was among the first major Linux desktop components to utilize D-Bus and HAL extensively. Since June 2009, however, NetworkManager no longer depends on HAL.
NetworkManager has two components:
Both components are intended by the developers to be reasonably portable, and the applet is available to desktop environments which implement the Freedesktop.org System Tray Protocol, including GNOME, KDE Plasma Workspaces, Enlightenment (window manager) and Xfce. As the components communicate via D-Bus, applications can be written to be “link-aware”, or to replace the provided applet entirely. One example is KNetworkManager, a KDE frontend to NetworkManager developed by Novell for SUSE Linux.
Antti Kaijanmäki announced the development of a mobile broadband configuration assistant for NetworkManager in April 2008[1] it became available in NetworkManager version 0.7.0. Together with the package mobile-broadband-provider-info the connection is easily configured.