- Gnome seems to do a fairly decent job of automatically detecting and
managing wireless networks. How would I go about this without
Gnome's assistance? Is there something that can be plugged into
XMonad which will show me available networks, and allow me to
nm-applet will work with something like trayer instead of the GNOME panel, although you may need to run xmonad under ck-start-session.
wicd is another possibility, and should be in the universe repo.
- What's the quickest way of accessing system settings. I've been
trying to run without the unity panel and launcher, but I've had to
respawn them just to get access to system setting.
It should be possible to run gnome-control-center or systemsettings (the KDE version, which you might need to install) without having to start either Gnome or KDE. The latter might work better, as KDE's not as much into the "let's start the whole desktop first!" thing.