CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

6 Responses to “Configure Wireless on the Command Line”

1. woot wrote, Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

   There are other slightly different ways to do it if you know that you'll only be connecting to one network, (ie the computer is a desktop).

   Personally I use a setup like this:

   a generated wpa_supplicant.conf using wpa_passphrase in /etc/

   my /etc/network/interfaces looks like

   auto ath0 iface ath0 inet dhcp pre-up wpa_supplicant -Bw -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dmadwifi pre-up dhclient ath0 pre-up sleep 5 post-down killall -r wpa_supplicant post-down killall -r dhclient

   Obviously this might not be the best way, and honestly I don't remember anymore why I needed the sleep 5 in there. This does however work well. I'll reconnect if the network drops out and it connects automatically on startup. (It also occurs to me that I might not actually need the dhclient call.)

2. Monte wrote, Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

   I find installing Ubuntu to be very easy. I use a old computer with a Pentium II, 192 Mb Ram and 300 MHz processor for my play machine and try everything on it. I am connected to the internet on it, but not wireless. Thanks for the tip, I will try a wireless card on it using your instructions. By the way, 7.10 is approaching a point where the full Ubuntu will not install on this old machine, and Xbuntu will not run a live cd on it.

3. Philip wrote, Wednesday, December 19th, 2007

   @Monte: Wow, that's some old hardware you're got. I find that the default GNOME version of Ubuntu runs far too sluggishly on my 600Mhz PIII and doesn't make for an enjoyable user experience. So, I've been playing around with Fluxbox and Openbox, starting from a minimal base install and working my way up. I'm quite impressed with the results and my old PIII is now rockin'. In fact, I'm so impressed with the simplicity and speed of Openbox I think I'm going to drop my GNOME desktops completely.

4. Sam wrote, Monday, January 28th, 2008

   Philip: I found the same and started using xfce. I love it. Especially the file manager.

5. martin wrote, Saturday, September 5th, 2009

   the command sudo iwconfig wlan0 key thisismykey give me that error …..

   Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) : invalid argument "thisismykey". sure i am doing something wrong :-) any help is appreciated!!!

6. Varun wrote, Saturday, September 12th, 2009

   @martin

   When you are using key as ASCII i.e. simple english letters use key s:mypassword, standard is for HEX key.

   Thanks