On Mon, 2016-05-23 at 08:28 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> Using low-level tools can indeed be tricky, so while they're more
> powerful than anything NM or wicd can do, they're an overkill and a
> waste of learning time if what you want is regular use of a single
> interface.
I have a new laptop on which only Stretch worked - and then only
partly. Among the things that didn't work were wicd (kept on
reinitialising the interface every 10 seconds or so) and network-
manager (didn't recognise the interface at all). This initially caused
a lot of head scratching and wasted time because I blamed the drivers
of new hardware. But it worked 100% reliably when in desperation I
configured it manually.
If you are posting to debian-devel manual configuration should not be
hard for you. Ensure ifupdown and ifplugd are installed. Add this
into /etc/network/interfaces:
auto wifi_interface
iface wifi_interface inet dhcp
pre-up systemctl stop wpa_supplicant || :
post-down systemctl start wpa_supplicant || :
wpa-driver nl80211,wext,wired
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
And add stanza's like this to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
for each WiFi network you want to use:
network={
ssid="a-network-i-use"
psk="super-secret"
}
network={
ssid="another-network-i-use"
psk="another-secret"
}
Doing it like this drops the amount of code between you and the metal
by an order of magnitude. Reliability goes up accordingly. Day to day
usage is identical - it just works wherever you are, connecting you to
the local network at boot without you having to raise a finger. Ease
of configuration is a matter of taste - I happen to prefer to being
able to see all my wifi networks in a text editor, so I won't be using
wicd or network-manager for wifi again.Attachment:
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