LinuxQuestions.org - WPA2 [netID and pass] wireless network from wicd and/or command line

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WPA2 [netID and pass] wireless network from wicd and/or command line

The university I go to uses a WPA2 wireless network that requires a netID and password to connect too.
I installed wicd but I can't seem to connect to this network, is there a way to add this functionality to wicd, and if so, how do I do that (links to a how-to or guide would be nice, I've yet to find one).

also, I spend most of my time on campus in the command line, so I'd like to know if there is a way to use command line utilities to connect to this network (again, a guide or how-to would be nice)

I can get online through my fedora live USB just fine (w/ network manager) but I'd rather get on directly from slackware.

thank you in advance!

If you're using wicd, you should first be sure you're using the most recent release. However, even with that release, I had some problems using WPA2. (You're supposed to be able to configure it from the "properties" button network selection box, but that didn't work for me on one of my systems but it worked fine on others.) So, what I did was to hard-code my network information in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, and that seemed to do the trick. (Note that I'm using a Fedora system, so my conf file location may differ from the Slack one.)

If you do a complete wicd install, you should have the wicd-curses package also installed, which provides a command-line wicd interface. That may be a separate package on Slack, but it should be available.

I understand that I haven't provided many details, but man wpa_supplicant.conf does describe the process fairly well.

Here's what my wicd configuration file looks like on a system where wicd works:

Code:

$ sudo cat /var/lib/wicd/configurations/00150544e96d 

[sudo] password for Peter: 

ap_scan=1

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={

      ssid="TSS3"

      scan_ssid=0

      proto=WPA RSN

      key_mgmt=WPA-PSK

      pairwise=CCMP TKIP

      group=CCMP TKIP

      psk=<- Redacted ->

}

Since you're using a different scheme, you need to "tweak" that example per the instructions the the wpa_supplicant manual pages.

Thank you ^_^ That helped a lot, actually - I hadn't been aware of the wpa_supplicant.conf man page, and the man page for wpa_supplicant didn't really help me, I'll try it out tomorrow when I'm back on campus and see how it goes :D

Any more advice is still appreciated, I can't test this until tomorrow so I won't know until then if it's solved or not :)

I just figured out what my problem with the system that was unable to use wicd: You can't have both the NetworkManager service and the wicd service running on the same system, and many distributions (I don't know about Slackware) default to having NetworkManager enabled. I'd neglected to disable NetworkManager and enable wicd on the problem system.

Now it works fine.

I don't think that that's your problem, but you should check. When the NetworkManager service is running, the wicd-client will appear to run, but functionality (like actually connecting to a network) will fail with strange messages, etc.