How to manage Wifi in xenial-i3 i3wm image UPDATE

[MarkHaysHarris777]

Greetings,

I ran into a small glitch while trying to manage wifi connection on my new xenial image using the i3wm  tiling window manager;  my ubuntu-mate image connected fine ( same hardware ) but I could not get the connection to work using the cli wpa_supplicant that I am used to.

The solution is really simple , as it turns out;  use the cli version of Network-Manager !

First, I reinstalled Network-Manager;  you may not need to do this step :

       sudo apt isntall network-manager --reinstall

Then bring up the wlan0 interface :

       sudo ip link set wlan0 up      (optional)

and lastly start the connection with the nmcli tool :

       nmcli d wifi connect <ssid> password <passphrase>

That's it.



use these commands to monitor the connections:

       nmcli -p d

       nmcli -p c

Notes:

       nmcli d wifi

The above command is similar to scanning; will show the available SSID in the area.

Once a connection is established the connection is persistent;  when you reboot the system it will attempt to establish that same connection again;  similar to the gui nm.

---

[AndyK]

nmtui also worked well for me if you want something terminal based but more friendly - its more gui-like than cli-like.

I didn't have to install anything - it seemed to be included with my system which was i3 installed on the stock Mate image.

Andy

[MarkHaysHarris777]

nmtui also worked well for me if you want something terminal based but more friendly - its more gui-like than cli-like.

thanks AndyK !

... ncurses based looks like;  its on my system and I tried it out;  thanks a lot/

[MarkHaysHarris777]

---

I installed the mate-terminal ( i3wm standard terminal and font are just too small for my eyes ).

... anyway,  the  nmtui  looks much better on the mate-terminal ( when using a larger font ) using a full sized window for the terminal IMHO.

... especially when editing connections !

[dahni]

nmtui also worked well for me if you want something terminal based but more friendly - its more gui-like than cli-like.

i think tui is the word you're looking for ;-)

I didn't have to install anything - it seemed to be included with my system which was i3 installed on the stock Mate image.

nmtui belongs to networkmanager, as the name suggests.