Hello,

While I think wicd is a great program, is not is entirely useable for me as I must connect to many ESSID's with long names and spaces, which wicd can't deal with.

Now, I was reading this page on the arch wiki, which seems to imply I can do a minimal configuration of wpa_supplicant.conf and use wpa_cli to scan and connect to networks, without having to define the network each time.

I would first like to check that my understand is correct, and then ask for some guidance on using wpa_cli in interactive mode. I have looked at the manpage, although I remain unsure on how to scan and select a network to connect to and where to put in the key.

If my understanding is correct, I should not have to manually use tools such as wpa_psk, correct?

You can use a gui front end to wpa, it's called 'wpa_gui' it's under the "network" section of k-menu.

I'd also recommend you read

http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/...=slackware:wpa

That is written by the author of many of the wireless/networking stuff for Slackware itself.

wpa_gui is not useful to me, as I need to do things from a command line.

I did have a look at aliens wiki, but it does not directly address my question.

and

Without knowing what your router can/cannot do there is _no_ way anyone can tell you which security protocol you need to use. There are many.

We need to know what sec protocol you're trying to work with, then we could help you setup the conf files (in accordence with alien's wiki - which shows how to setup slackware to talk to the router using said conf files).

The wiki is not relevant to my question.

I will be connecting to many different networks, WEP, WPA and WPA2.

What I am asking is if it is possible to setup wpa_supplicant so I can use wpa_cli in a way similar to wicd, as implied by the arch wiki link.

Aliens wiki is useful for configuring single networks, which is not what I am after.

While I cannot specifically answer that part, I did some digging on the update_config option that arch refers to.

It turns out, on a default Slack install you would not know if that option is available or not.

So what I did was download the source tarball:

http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar...pa_supplicant/

Then I reviewed the contents of:
wpa_supplicant-0.6.9/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Which is a default file that comes with the source and is different than the one that Slackware ships.

The following is the notes from the source on that option:

So my though is on this is; our wpa is similar enough to the arch wiki tutorial. So if we assume they're correct, it should work for you if what they're describing is what you want.

Just be sure to backup any files before you go making changes and forget what you did, so you can revert back to clean config's if need be.

Hope that helps even tho it doesn't completely answer your question, as I don't have that many routers here to do a test like that here

- Fogie