HOWTO: Use Gnome Network Manager in other DE

As of 10.04 beta I have begun using the KDE desktop environment. I really like many of the things KDE has to offer, however KDE's network manager applet (knetworkmanager) still is lacking compared to Gnome's applet. After installing the network-manager-gnome and manually launching it under KDE it worked great! The only issue I had was that when I rebooted I had to manually relaunch it and then even after I had added it to my startup programs it still failed to store my passwords (even though I had the gnome-keyring installed).

The following are the steps I have taken to have the Gnome nm-applet auto load at KDE's startup and have it work with the gnome-keyring.

#1 Firstly install the nm-applet and the keyring and remove KDE's default net work manager. On Ubuntu/Debian based distros you can do this with the following command in terminal: sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome gnome-keyring && sudo apt-get remove knetworkmanager

#2 Add the command nm-applet to your desktop environment's startup applications.

#3 This is the trick to making the gnome keyring work under another environment, either launch the following three commands in order at startup or put them in a script and run it at startup:

eval "`gnome-keyring-daemon`"
export GNOME_KEYRING_PID
export GNOME_KEYRING_SOCKET

Log out and log back into your desktop environment and the gnome network manager should now be auto loading and saving your encryption keys!

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland