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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Wifi setup in devuan

[Not sure where to post this, admin please move this if it's in the wrong place.]

Yesterday I moved my devuan machine to a new location where there's only wifi access (no direct ethernet connection). After moving I discovered I couldn't connect to wifi. Thankfully, some googling on my mobile device solved the problem. So I'm posting this here in case somebody in a similar situation may find it helpful.

1) First, a few packages are required for WiFi access: wireless-tools and wpasupplicant. Also, you probably need a DHCP client (unless your wifi network allocates static IPs for your machine), so install also isc-dhcp-client. Well, of course, you also need a wireless adapter and the requisite kernel drivers, but that IMO goes without saying.

2) Use iwconfig to find the name of the wireless interface (e.g., 'wlan0'). Add the following stanza to /etc/network/interfaces to create a definition for this interface:

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
	wpa-conf	/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

The `wpa-conf` line is the magic sauce for the next step to work, because, as I found out the hard way, Debian/Devuan's default config runs wpa-supplicant without any additional options, so it will ignore the wpa_supplicant.conf file and you won't be able to connect.  You could also use the `wpa-ssid` and `wpa-psk` directives instead of `wpa-conf` if you only have a single network you want to connect to always. But the `wpa-conf` route is needed if you have multiple networks which you can choose from, and you want wpa-supplicant to automatically select the one with the best signal strength.

3) Now create the file /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf with the following contents (replace the ssid and psk with the relevant credentials):

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
	ssid="MyNetworkSSID"
	scan_ssid=1
	key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
	psk="MySecretPassword"
}

You can add more than one network definition in this file; simply create more network={...} blocks like above and fill in the relevant details.

4) Now running `ifup wlan0` should connect to the wifi network and bring up the interface. The `auto wlan0` line in /etc/network/interfaces will bring it up on reboot; comment out or delete this line if you want to bring it up manually instead.

Last edited by quickfur (2023-12-24 22:50:57)

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn

Member

Registered: 2023-11-27

Posts: 190  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

your post made me curious regarding a vanilla Devuan Daedalus live-session and/or pristine install bootup on a wireless capable laptop. the live-session came right up and had wireless connections available(old but not ancient lenovo y580 test machine).

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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

I wonder if my issues were caused by migrating to daedalus from Debian Trixie. Maybe there's some incompatibility there somewhere.

paculino

Member

From: North Carolina, USA

Registered: 2023-12-26

Posts: 8  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

This is not important, but is it possible to get this to show up on wifi indicator applets? If not, I may (depending on free time next semester) try to edit the mate applet showing wifi to have a gui for this.

golinux

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 3,316  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

@quickfur . . . Did you follow either of the migration instructions posted here? Apologies if you mentioned that you did previously . . .

Also the wireless prefixes are the old ones not the ones in Debian. Don't ask me what they are. I don't have wireless enabled.

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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

Yes, I followed those migration instructions but had to modify some of them, mainly because they were for debian/bookworm(?) but I was already on debian/trixie. There were some conflicts that needed strong-arming with `dpkg --force-depends` to resolve, though it all worked out in the end.  But the process may have caused my system to become a frankenstein mixture of devuan and debian/trixie. In fact, it did, I already ran into a problem recently with libcurl4-dev: I had a 8.x installed from debian/trixie but the devuan version is still at 7.x. That also needed some force-depends strong-arming to work around.

So probably my non-working default wifi settings also has something to do with this, though I found a less extreme solution as described above.

paculino

Member

From: North Carolina, USA

Registered: 2023-12-26

Posts: 8  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

I think if you use apt pinning of the current repos to be over 1000, it will downgrade, quickfur.

quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Re: Wifi setup in devuan

Probably, though currently I don't feel like it. The system works fine as it is, and I can fix problems as they come along.