I was reading up on the various options for wireless on BLFS, with a thought from trying something besides the usual (for me) Network Manager). I read about iwd (not to be confused with iw, which is in the BLFS book) and it seems interesting. Of particular interest is how, just from the command line, it can not only prompt you for a password to connect to a given wifi, but it will automatically save and use that password in the future. Well, in theory.

Has anyone used iwd in their BLFS system? How did you like it?

Thank you.

Some more reading. iwd is in the repo of Void, Alpine and Devuan. Seems ligit, so I compiled it.

The compilation was a little odd. One of the dependencies has to be detarred alongside the iwd source and then they both get compiled. Aside from that, not difficult. DESTDIR worked with make install.

I ran the daemon /lib/libexec/iwd in a root shell, then ran the text interface controller, iwctl.

Although my wifi uses the new-style name of wlp13s0, and despite iwd being a newer program, it showed my wifi as wlan0. Erm OK? I connected to it. It even showed the signal strength as a string of *'s.

Dhcp handling is broken. I did more reading, set up the config file in /etc/iwd/ and enabled what seemed to be the right settings, restarted iwd and ... no dhcp. Near as I can tell, me having the dhcp client is what the problem is. It wants opendhcp or systemd's dhcp thingie. There was something about an internal dhcp funcion inside iwd but that for reasons unknown doesn't work either.

I've no ideas.

In the past i have used just wpa-supplicant and dhcpcd to connect to wireless. These days i just use NetworkManager and it's built-in dhcp resolver (i think in the recent past, dhcpcd stopped working right with networkmanager). Half the time i just connect via usb tethering and charge my phone at the same time.

I suggest you install dhcpcd (without 'privilege separation') and try it out. After the connection is established use: and just before disconnecting use: It should alter the /etc/resolv.conf file if it's working. If that file don't exist i would create it first.

Thanks for the reply.

I ended up taking out iwd and putting in WPA Supplicnt & NetworkManager. I guess it's the inescapable combination for a wifi-using system.