newbie questions- laptop wireless for Wheezy with Gnome

[keitho@strucktower.com]

I hate to say this, but I am confused about how to configure wireless on
my Wheezy laptop system.

I originally installed Wheezy from a weekly net install, which means that
I had to add components I wanted. At one point I had the wireless working
through trial and error configuring the /etc/network/interfaces file for
my home wireless.

But now currently I am out-of-town with my laptop, so I want to setup
Gnome to use an applet which will automatically scan available wireless
networks that I can choose from, and prompt me for the security key when
one is selected (if needed). This is the normal setup I see on other
people's laptops, and is the default when I boot from a Knoppix cd, for
instance.

But I can't seem to figure out which software packages I need to do this.
I am downloading the deb packages on a different computer then transfering
them via USB flashdrive to my laptop, then using dpkg -i to install them.
Of course I have had to get all the package dependencies, which takes
time. So far I have installed wireless-tools, network-manager,
wpasupplicant, network-manager-gnome, and a bunch of lib dependiencies.
But I don't have an network-manager-applet. When I look online for an
applet I only find the source, not a binary deb package.

I have read the wiki page on network-manager and the
/usr/share/doc/wireless-tools/README.Debian, but they confuse me and seem
to be for hard coding a particular wireless connection- not what I want.

Can someone help explain to me how to do this and/or what I am doing wrong?

Thanks,
Keith