Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Configure Wireless on the Command Line

Today I have mainly been attempting to create a very light installation of Ubuntu on an old Pentium III. I started by installing a base system with the Ubuntu alternative install disk. After the base system was installed I then tried to configure my wireless card from the command line. I was half expecting this to be a difficult task, however it wasn't actually too difficult and thanks to some rather nifty instructions I managed to get my wireless card working in no time. For future reference here are the necessary commands:

1. Turn the interface on with the following command:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

2. Scan for a list of all the available access points:

iwlist wlan0 scanning

3. Select the access point with the following command:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid ACCESSPOINT

4. Set WEP or WPA passphrase, if needed:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 key PASSPHRASE

5. Finally, connect to DHCP server and obtain an IP address:

sudo dhclient

I'll post more details about the actual system install when I get more time, for now I just wanted to get these instructions down in case I end up having to start again from scratch.


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