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Why is the nm-tool command line tool not available in Ubuntu 15.04?

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  • 1
    You mean nmcli?
    – Jos
    May 1, 2015 at 20:48
  • 2
    @Jos no, this is really about nm-tool.
    – guntbert
    Sep 26, 2015 at 16:49

3 Answers 3

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Please read the 2015-01-27 changelog for network manager. A snippet form all the changes ...

network-manager (0.9.10.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  • New upstream release.
  • Exclude libtool .la files from list-missing.
  • Update symbols files.
  • Update Build-Depends as per configure.ac.
  • Build and install nmtui, a curses-based interface for easier console operation.
  • Install new device plugins.
  • Stop installing the nm-tool binary which was dropped upstream as it has been replaced by the much more powerful nmcli tool.

The name of what you want is nmcli.

Besides that there is a new tool call nmtui:

network-manager (0.9.10.0-1) unstable; urgency=medium

  • New upstream release.
  • Exclude libtool .la files from list-missing.
  • Update symbols files.
  • Update Build-Depends as per configure.ac.
  • Build and install nmtui, a curses-based interface for easier console operation.

From the manual page for nmtui:

nmtui — Text User Interface for controlling NetworkManager

nmtui [edit | connect | hostname] [...] 
nmtui-edit [connection-id | connection-name] 
nmtui-connect [connection-name | connection-uuid | device-name | Wi-Fi-SSID] 
nmtui-hostname
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  • 2
    In addition, they added a new tool nmtui.
    – muru
    May 2, 2015 at 5:03
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nm-tool was used to report network manager's status and information about interfaces, providing a convenient summary of network connections and your connection status. However my understanding is that as of 15.04 Ubuntu is switching to systemd service manager, and NetworkManager from previous versions doesn't work quite well with systemd, hence now NetworkManager has changed to the one very similar to NetworkManager used in Fedora ( which by the way uses systemd ).

What you can do is to use nmcli options to give you a convenient summary of just like nm-tool use to do. In particular use nmcli device show <interface>. This is the same as nmcli dev list <iface> on the previous version. <interface> part is optional, and can be used only if you need info about specific interface, such as wlan0 or eth0. To view info for alll interfaces, use nmcli dev show. There is a lot of material , so you can pipe it all into less like so : nmcli dev show | less

And here is a little one-liner I wrote to give general overview of system connections: nmcli dev show | awk '/GENERAL.DEVICE/,/GENERAL.DRIVER/;/GENERAL.CONNECTION/;/IP4.ADDRESS/,/IP4.DOMAIN/'

Sample output:

GENERAL.DEVICE:                         eth0
GENERAL.TYPE:                           802-3-ethernet
GENERAL.VENDOR:                         Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
GENERAL.PRODUCT:                        RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
GENERAL.DRIVER:                         r8169
GENERAL.CONNECTION:                     not connected
GENERAL.DEVICE:                         wlan0
GENERAL.TYPE:                           802-11-wireless
GENERAL.VENDOR:                         Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
GENERAL.PRODUCT:                        RTL8187SE Wireless LAN Controller
GENERAL.DRIVER:                         r8180
GENERAL.CONNECTION:                     /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/ActiveConnection/0
IP4.ADDRESS[1]:                         ip = ******/24, gw = ******.1
IP4.DNS[1]:                             208.67.222.222
IP4.DNS[2]:                             208.67.220.220
IP4.DNS[3]:                             8.8.8.8
IP4.DOMAIN[1]:                          ******.edu

nmcli dev wifi will list available access points. Note, that dev and device are used interchangeably.

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  • I had to use nmcli device wifi list or I would get the error Error: 'dev' command 'list' is not valid.
    – mchid
    Oct 16, 2015 at 1:42
  • @mchid that's strange. What version of Ubuntu you're using ?
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Oct 16, 2015 at 1:45
  • this is on 15.04
    – mchid
    Oct 16, 2015 at 20:34
  • 1
    @mchid OK, let me fix the answer a little bit . . . .In 15.04 dev doesn't take list as argument , it's replaced by show.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Oct 16, 2015 at 20:43
  • Yes, dev seems to work fine when wifi is specified.
    – mchid
    Oct 16, 2015 at 20:46
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As of recent versions, nm-tool is no longer included as part of the network-manager package.

For 15.04+:

You can, however, extract nm-tool from the 14.04 version of network-manager. Here's how it can be done.

It should be noted that there may have been security updates since posting this. You can visit http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/network-manager to verify the version listed below is the most recent version available.

Run the following commands:

cd
mkdir nm-tool; cd nm-tool
wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/network-manager/network-manager_0.9.8.8-0ubuntu7.1_amd64.deb
ar xvf *
tar xvf dat*
sudo mv ./usr/bin/nm-tool /usr/local/bin/
cd ..
rm -r nm-tool

The following commands should now be available:

nm-tool.

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  • 1
    nm-applet and nm-connection-editor are for the GUI. It seems a bad idea to mess with both of them. nm-online is provided by 15.04's Network Manager, so there's no reason to mess with that either. Also, use the dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile command for extracting files from .deb files. I'd use something like: dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile network-manager_*.deb | tar -xC / ./usr/bin/nm-tool
    – muru
    Oct 16, 2015 at 3:02
  • @muru thanks, I've updated but will have to try the --fsys-tarfile later, thanks. Also, I mostly used nm-tool for listing bssids, ssids, and strengths of local signals and nmcli can be used to do this with: nmcli -f BSSID,SSID,SIGNAL,BARS dev wifi list anyhow.
    – mchid
    Oct 16, 2015 at 3:43
  • @Maxwel, edits shouldn't fundamentally change the code in a post. Please write a comment instead.
    – wjandrea
    Oct 25, 2018 at 18:30

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