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Ubuntu: managing your wireless network

Does Ubuntu have an API (or command line) for viewing available wireless networks, their strengths, etc. and connecting to one?

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network-manager has dbus service. You can use any language with dbus binding to talk to it.



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ifconfig and iwconfig are used to manage network connections. Your wifi adapter may also have special applications to create an initial network device, as in the case of madwifi, which will create a thanks (x is numeric) device that can be controlled by ifconfig and iwconfig. It should also be mentioned that the limited hardware driver application that comes with Ubuntu is very well suited for installing and configuring Wi-Fi drivers.

Ubuntu, depending on the variant, comes with network managers, for KDE its knetworkmanager and gnome - the gnome-netstatus-applet.



By default, these apps start depending on the variant.

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Linux supports something called Wireless Extensions , which defines a common interface for different wireless cards. Extensions define a set of IOCTL calls and netlink events that are used to configure devices and also to retrieve information about detected events (for example, disconnecting from an access point).

For example applications using wireless extensions, Wireless Tools for Linux (iwconfig, iwlist, etc.) and wpa_supplicant .

Note that not all devices support wireless extensions, so you may need to work with proprietary interfaces such as MadWiFi.

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for the command line; scan can be done with iwlist (try man iwlist).

iwlist wlan0 scan

wlan0 is the name of the wireless interface in my case

for the gui part, I prefer wicd; easy to use, support wep, wpa, wpa2

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Ubuntu tends to use the "Awesome Power (TM) Undocumented Framework (TM)", "Undocumented Broker Bus Objects (TM)", and "Undocumented Abstraction Layers (TM)". But luckily there is community support where you can go to IRC and talk to all the other people who are just like you read the undocumentation.

Go to the ifconfig

, iwconfig

, iwlist

and wpa_supplicant

if you want to have documentation that explains how it works. Or you can just run it once, look at the output, and figure out how to write a shell script that does what you want.

I'm not bitter. It's my pleasure. Why did you say that?: D

(In truth, NetworkManager doesn't make iw {config, list} false, but it doesn't count on nm without overriding the parameters you use to request them.)

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The command line utility nmtui

provides a built-in graphical interface to connect to wireless networks, see their strength, and connect to them.

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