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My current wifi network (and i'm writing this with the help of Windows -.- ) has a special character in it's SSID: "ö", a so-called "umlaut".

If changing the SSID is not an option, how to connect to such a network?

This does not work with Ubuntu 12.04 or Android 2.3.6 or Android 4.0, so I guess it's a general Linux problem. The network adapter is a "Broadcom 4313".

[Update] The problem is, that the network is hidden. Both Android and Ubuntu fail to interpret the manually entered SSID string correctly. However both systems can see the network, if it's not hidden. Ubuntu sees the SSID name correctly, Android fails at the umlaut "ö" and misses the following two characters too, (so instead of "[some characters]örc[some other characters]" it sees "[some characters] [some other characters]").

So it's the combination of hidden SSID and special-character-SSID that causes the problem. [/Update]

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How have you been trying to connect? NetworkManager? Command line? – Tim May 25 '12 at 19:50
If you are using wcid there is a recent bug about this on Debian: bugs.launchpad.net/wicd/+bug/996179 – Tim May 25 '12 at 19:56
I don't use the command line. With ubuntu i'm using the wifi symbol in the top right corner and on android just the default wifi manager. I don't know if this is wcid in background – stefan May 25 '12 at 20:42
Can you get the network un-hidden? Hiding the SSID doesn't really gain much security. Its still quite visible to anyone with a passive scanner, as long as there is traffic. And the second a client (re-)connects, the name becomes available. – derobert Aug 24 '12 at 17:08
2  
yes, un-hiding is a valid solution. It wasn't my private network and some people prefer hidden networks, so it was a bad solution. Nevertheless, there should be a way to connect to such networks. After all, other OS (as Windows) don't have any problem with that. – stefan Aug 24 '12 at 17:41
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4 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

As for the Android problem, myself and others have had success with this Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.roamingsoft.manager

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That's good to know. Would be better to know the "manual way", but it's better than nothing. Thanks for that! – stefan May 25 '12 at 20:56
No problem. I will update this answer if I ever notice a manual way, and if I remember this post ;) – Tim May 25 '12 at 20:58
Unfortunately this seems to be not functional for my case. Maybe it's a problem since the network is hidden.. That's just terrible.. – stefan May 25 '12 at 21:29
up vote 0 down vote

May be my suggestion is a a stupid one, but you could just set Deutsch keyboard layout with $ setxkbmap -layout de or graphical tool on your system and type in the SSID?

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It's the same with this answer: I'm not at home for a few days, so I will not be able to try this. I'll need to create a test configuration of my router since personally I don't use such a useless SSID/hiding thingy. Thanks for your answer, I'll come back to this later – stefan Sep 16 '12 at 20:59
up vote 0 down vote

I'm curious to see what happens if you create a QR code for this WiFi network and then use that to set up the network in Android. I don't have an Android device but I've heard that Android supports setting up WiFi this way and maybe that will get around the encoding issue.

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I'm not at home for a few days, so I will not be able to try this. I'll need to create a test configuration of my router since personally I don't use such a useless SSID/hiding thingy. Thanks for your answer, I'll come back to this later – stefan Sep 16 '12 at 20:59
up vote 0 down vote

What about adding manual entry into wpa_supplicant.conf? For SSID with 'umlaut' just add ssid-entry in hex.

SSID=$(echo 'SSID' | xxd -u -p)

network={
    priority=1
    ssid=$SSID
    mode=0
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    psk="PASSWORD"
}

do not use the var in the conf file. just get it from terminal and write hex down without quotes.

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