Connecting to Wireless AP manually

Cassanova · 05-14-2009, 05:17 PM

K. here's the situation. I have a Laptop running Fedora Core 10 (64 bit). I recently have fallen in love with window managers (openbox to be precise); the Problem is, when in these window managers, I cannot connect to wireless APs. I've tried restarting the network manager, but alas it has no effect. So, I'm left with terminal commands (YAY!!! I love any chance to use those.) so is there a command that I need to use to connect manually?

MoonMind · 05-15-2009, 10:09 AM

Yep - the program is called iwconfig; if you want WPA, you'll also need wpa-supplicant.

After setting up your connection, you can make it active with ifconfig and get an IP address with Fedora's choice of DHCP client dhclient or dhcpcd - I recall it's the latter, but I may be wrong (I haven't used FC for some time).

The links lead to man pages - the rest of the fun is figuring out the options... If you don't want this, a basic tutorial is here; note that you'll have either to be root or to use sudo to do all this.

M.

Cassanova · 05-16-2009, 06:26 PM

Okay, I've used ifconfig and iwconfig before, but mainly just to check on IPs. I didn't know I could use them to connect to services... although now that I think of it, It soes seem quite logical. I'd mark this forum as solved, but don't know how

MoonMind · 05-17-2009, 12:59 PM

Cassanova:

Sorry, but since you said you liked dabbling with the CLI, I thought linking to man pages (and thus to the main source of viable information) was the right thing to do. Since I don't know anything about your network (like encryption: WEP, WPA, type of key, among other things) and your hardware (type of chipset or at least type of device your laptop uses for wireless networking), I can't go into the details yet.

If you really like finding out things, the man pages offer great guides to the correct options; if you need further help, you can either search the forum (I know for a fact that this has been covered time and again) or check back here. If you provide more information (after reading parts of the manuals, perhaps), doing a step-for-step guide is not too difficult.

M.

Cassanova · 05-29-2009, 12:26 PM

Sorry I sound so clueless (I've never done this manually) I followed your tutorial link; it would be great... only problem Is, that I've got my AP set up as, hidden (which I don't think is really a problem but I've been wrong before) and WPA2 Encrypted, I assume I have WPA Supplicant already, because I've got no trouble when I connect using NetworkManager in Gnome. That being said, Your tutorial (as well as most of the Forum posts I've read), assumes WEP encryption. What Do I need to do differently, given these Circumstances?

shibeaux · 06-04-2009, 05:30 AM

Try looking this tutorial. Itś made for Ubuntu users, but think that it's ok for u.

farslayer · 06-04-2009, 08:28 AM

just in case you want an alternative to the command line or the piece of cruft they call network-manager (sorry not a fan of that app)..
take a look at wicd http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

Quote:

Some of Wicd's features include:

1. No Gnome dependencies (although it does require GTK), so it is easy to use in XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, Enlightenment, etc.
2. Ability to connect to wired and wireless networks
3. Profiles for each wireless network and wired network
4. Many encryption schemes, some of which include WEP/WPA/WPA2 (and you can add your own)
5. Remains compatible with wireless-tools
6. Tray icon showing network activity and signal strength

There are instructions for installing Wicd on Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, Slackware, and Gentoo on the downloads page, although it should work on any Linux distro.

Also a curses interface is available for wicd if you really want to go old school..

Just a though. enjoy !!