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Possible Duplicate:
All commands that should be used to connect to wifi in command line
I don't need to configure my wifi card or anything. I just want to do the equivalent of a) listing the wifi devices in my neighbourhood, and b) connecting to one (and setting up the password for it) as I do in the GUI.
Surely there's a command-line command for this?
I'll assume wlan0 is the name of your wireless device.
Bring the device up: ifconfig wlan0 up.
List the wireless networks with iwlist wlan0 scan | less and find the network you want to connect to.
Use wpa_supplicant to associate and connect with the network.
a) Create a config file for wpa_supplicant, containing encryption information about the network. See man wpa_supplicant.conf for examples. Try with simplest entries first.
b) Run wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf (as root; assuming /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf is the name of the config file). If it works, run it in the background and redirect the output somewhere (I just dump it to /dev/null.)
Use dhclient wlan0 or dhcpcd wlan0 to obtain IP.
PROFIT!
There's also wicd, which has a text-mode menu-driven frontend wicd-curses which lists the networks and does the setting and dhcp stuff for you.
