David - Musings of an SRE

Wifi Configuration - Ncurses style

So I’ve been having this irritating problem of configuring wifi on my small mini-computers in command-line.

Getting a little bit frustrated with the tedious work of configuring the wpa-supplement and /etc/network/interfaces just to get my system configured with my home network, I found this nifty little tool called wicd.

WICD is a network manager that comes in many flavors mostly in GUI ontop of a X Window.

Running a headless Raspberry Pi, I don’t want to boot up and X11 forward a display just to configure it.

Luckily, WICD comes with an ncurses version which makes the configuration step so much easier.

All you need is just to do a:

# on debian-ubuntu systems:
$ sudo apt-get wicd-curses

Most distributions already manage the package so you can quickly get in there and pull it.

This tutorial may help too.