[ale] Making a wifi connection from the command line?

[Horkan Smith]

Alex, do you have a use case where you have two or more wireless networks available at the same time, and need to choose between 'em via cmdline?  I had that working on a previous Debian release, but only by making up logical interface names and a mapping script that translated the logical names into to real device.  For the laptop Debian partitions, I eventually gave up on ifupdown and /etc/network/interfaces and just manually use wpa_supplicant.

later!
   horkan

On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 09:08:11PM -0700, Alex Carver wrote:
> Under Debian wheezy I don't even have a GUI for the network
> configuration.  I just add the wireless info (SSID, key, etc.) to
> /etc/network/interfaces and then use 'ifup wlan0' to bring up my network
> (actually happens automatically because my wireless card is PCMCIA but I
> have altered it manually before.)
> 
> iface wlan0 inet dhcp
>   wpa-ssid <ssid>
>   wpa-psk <key>
>   wpa-scan-ssid 1
>   wpa-ap-scan 1
> 
> On 2014-05-02 10:22, Horkan Smith wrote:
> > I had to do quite a bit of digging on something similar (was playing w/ an Arch and a Fedora install on my laptop.)
> > 
> > 'nmcli' is the command line version of the Network Manager client.  For Debian, it's part of the network-manager package, so you probably already have it.
> > 
> > Try 'nmcli con list' to list your possible connections, then try 'nmcli con up id put_your_connection_name_from_the_list_here'
> > 
> > If that doesn't work, let me know....
> > 
> > later!
> >    horkan
> > 
> > On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 10:24:41AM -0400, Wolf Halton wrote:
> >> Wifi on Ubuntu is usually a simple nm-applet in the notifications-bar
> >> issue: choose the wireless network you want and connect - enter the
> >> password and it automagically connects to that Wireless network every time
> >> you go there, forever and ever, amen.
> >>
> >> I upgraded UbuntuStudio 13.10 to 14.04Beta over the wire, and there were a
> >> few problems with the Xfce desktop (standard on UbuntuStudio).  The
> >> nm-applet is running but no icon is visible in the notifications box.  The
> >> Dropbox icon and Copy.com icons are missing as well.
> >>
> >> I cannot find an cli command to get me to connect to a new wifi network.  I
> >> would like to find a cli command to do this.  Hard to believe this is not
> >> an included functionality.
> >>
> >> Would I be better off just to install the whole Gnome desktop and see if
> >> the notifications work correctly there, or backing up /home and bare-metal
> >> installing UbuntuStudio 14.04 again?
> >>
> >> Wolf Halton
> >>
> >> --
> >> This Apt Has Super Cow Powers - http://sourcefreedom.com
> >> Security in the Cloud - http://AtlantaCloudTech.com<http://atlantaCloudTech.com>
> > 
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> > 
> 
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-- 
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net