How best to replace NetworkManager with wicd?

[keitho@strucktower.com]

Sometime back I moved one of my laptops from using Gnome to using a wm (i3
at present). I have been slowly trying to learn the various functions that
the Gnome DE does in the background (hides from the user) so that I can
replace the Gnome-related-software to software which is desktop
independent.

I'm a bit confused as to how to replace NetworkManager with wicd (using
both wired and wireless connections). After installing wicd, I thought
perhaps I could simply turn off NetworkManager, configure wicd, then when
I am satisfied everything works with wicd properly I will uninstall
NetworkManager. I am hoping that this approach won't leave me stranded
with an incomplete or non-working interface configurations.

I thought I could simply invoke

$sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop

to unload the Networkmanager daemon while playing around with configuring
wicd, but that doesn't work. I get:

$NetworkManager is already running (pid 3879)

So then I try to kill the process, but it automatically restarts in about
20-30 seconds.

So then I think maybe I should stop the networking daemon. But then, when
I restart it how do I tell the system to use wicd instead of
NetworkManager?

So I guess there's a bunch of stuff I still don't understand (duh!).

Is there a tutorial someone can point me to that would help educate me on
how best to approach this task? Or do I need to go cold-turkey and
uninstall NetworkManager before configuring wicd?

So far I am looking at:
http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php and
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch05.en.html

Thanks,
Keith Ostertag