Wireless from the Terminal

How to set up wireless from the command line (this assums wlan0 is your wireless card):

• log in as root

 su

• Enable the wireless card

 ifconfig wlan0 up

• Back up your wpa_supplicant config file

 cp /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.back

• Edit your wpa_supplicatnt.conf to remove all but one 'network' block (or leave a couple if you're going to connect to more than one network)

 vi /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

• Edit that 'network' block with the appropriate information for your router then save and exit the file
• Connect to your wireless network

 iwconfig wlan0 essid <ssid>

• Authenticate yourself on the network

 wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

• Check your wireless card

 iwconfig wlan0

• verify that the SSID is <Your Router>
• wait 10 seconds
• Request an IP address from your router

 dhcpcd wlan0

• Check to see that you have a valid IP address for wlan0

 ifconfig

• Log off root

 exit

Note: Although this should work, it may require hours of frustration with little explanation of why things are not working. I recently talked my friend through this over the phone and it took about 3 hours all together, and that was after I had already spent a couple of hours setting it up on a different network to make sure it was working.

References: [1] [2] [3]