Network management

This article Article description::lists network management software to establish and manage network connections.

Gentoo provides several tools for managing network connections. If you have emerged OpenRC without network support, i.e. with both USE flags and  disabled, you might need to set up a network manager such as net-misc/netifrc, net-misc/dhcpcd, net-misc/wicd, net-misc/networkmanager, or. Or, you have the option of emerging OpenRC with the use flag and configuring  and  if you only use static interfaces.

Available software
The easiest to use is dhcpcd. It has perfect integration for wpa_supplicant and automatically switches between wired and wireless connections. In case of using dhcpcd as network manager, the USE flags  and   may be deactivated in OpenRC.

Gentoo's standard however for network management is using Gentoo net.* scripts aka netifrc.

Comparison table with wifi supplicant and modem managers
Here are some network packages, along with their capabilities, that are available in Gentoo: