First, be sure to not mix a stable repository (such as the first one you link, “openSUSE_11.3”) with a Factory repository (the second link, “openSUSE_Factory”). This could lead to huge problems.
Second, the recommended repositories are : oss, non-oss (the official openSUSE repositories that are supported during the entire lifecycle of the product), and Packman (the main 3rd party repository that provides lot of useful/essential software, but not officially supported by Novell).
All the other repositories can be used, but at your own risks (not supported/patched during the lifecycle of the openSUSE release). And yeah, wicd isn’t in the main repo because nobody is willing to take care of patching/backporting security fix for it during the entire life of the release (18 months).
Since wicd (although like you say is not been taken care of / ported/ patched) still beats every other wifi solution suse has to offer… why not put effort into that, instead? Every network manager i have seen from suse (even from back in the day from the original SuSE has been buggy, although on every distro i have tried (Opensuse, slackware, gentoo, debian, BT, zen) wicd ALWAYS did the job beautifully.
No rant intended, however it would be nice to see a good package being kept alive rather (after so many years) supporting a crappy one (no offense).
Actually the default knetworkmanager works great for me. Why don’t You try the plasmoid network manager instead ? I’ve heard some good things about it but never tried it myself.
A few months ago, I did a little investigation in this area.
If anything is inaccurate, corrections welcome.
Network Manager for the Gnome and KDE desktops (maybe other desktops as well) are versions of the same Gnome Network Manager
At least on KDE, Knetwork Manager can store both WPA and WEP credentials in clear text or encrypted database, at least on KDE the latter is default.
Whether running Network Manager or not, I’ve found that at least for WPA networks, it’s possible to manage your wireless networks entirely using wpa_supplicant and iw (both should be in OSS repositories).
I found the combination of wpa_supplicant (which stores WPA connections and hashed passphrases) and iw is completely sufficient in discovering/scanning, managing, connecting and disconnecting WPA networks from the CLI.
I haven’t found a similar tool yet that supports WEP.
