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

[Alex Carver]

No, I've not had to use multiple networks on this particular laptop.
Nearly every one of my Debian machines has been hardwired.  This is
actually the first Debian laptop I've had.  Right now it's just my
mobile terminal for wandering around the house.  But seeing mention of
iwconfig/iwlist made me think of the Merakis I have using OpenWRT.  I
use iwconfig there because the Merakis do go mobile elsewhere.  I
actually use them as my bridge and firewall.  They connect to the
foreign wireless network and my laptop plugs into the Meraki's ethernet
jack.  The whole file system is read-only so no one can write any
changes to it or overwrite any binaries if they ever got in.

On 2014-05-03 06:13, Horkan Smith wrote:
> 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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