Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org get all the glory. They're highly visible as cornerstone applications of the free desktop. But what about the background apps that do the grunt work and sit silently in the background, ignored unless we run into a bug?

Here's a quick comparison between a few network control tools for Linux. These tools all give you some sort of network control from the Desktop - a service traditionally provided by daemons and initialization scripts.

For years I have envied how easy my Windows- and Mac-based peers had it when traveling with their laptops. They connect to hotspots with ease, get online while I was still logging into root and running some tools. It just wasn’t fair. I wanted an integrated easy-to-use tool that did not require bringing up a shell or logging into root.