Pain-Free Networking

Networking on Linux right now is painful for the mobile desktop user, especially in comparison to other operating systems. You should never need to use the command line or configuration files to manage your network (unless you want to!); everything should "Just Work" as automatically as possible and intrude as little as possible into your workflow. NetworkManager attempts to make networking invisible. When moving into areas you've been before, NetworkManager automatically connects to the last network you chose to connect to. Likewise, when back at the desk, NetworkManager will switch to the faster, more reliable wired network connection. Or while you're on the road, use your mobile broadband connection to

Flexible, Extendable, Open

The most important pieces of NetworkManager are desktop-environment and distribution agnostic, functioning just as well in Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc. across distributions like Fedora Core, Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian, and Gentoo. And since the NetworkManager components communicate with each other using dbus, it's easy to to build network-aware applications in languages like C, C++, and Python.

Application Integration

Using the awesome power and flexibility of dbus and hal, NetworkManager provides facilities for other applications like browsers, email clients, or system services to be aware of the network's state and adjust their operation accordingly. If you're not online, your computer shouldn't try to update itself, and when you're on a mobile broadband network, it probably shouldn't either. With NetworkManager, software knows where it is, and how it's connected.

More Information

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