[ltp] No wireless after Debian install

[Richard Neill]

On 02/12/2020 02:06, Steve Izma wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 08:57:13PM -0500, Cynthia Eliason wrote:
>> Subject: Re: [ltp] No wireless after Debian install
>>
>>    Thank you! I found and installed the non-free firmware package but it
>>    doesn't seem to have changed anything.  I re-started the computer but
>>    it is still only offering me the Ethernet connection.
>>
>>     Looking for information I opened the dreaded terminal and typed
>>     lspci and it said "command not found."  Tried "iwconfig" and
>>     "command not found."
> 
> lspci should be in the pciutils package. iwconfig I think is
> deprecated. The "ip" command should give you useful information,
> probably with "ip link". It should list all the networking
> devices it can find.

For what it's worth, iwconfig only really helps in the long-obsolete WEP 
mode.

If you're trying to temporarily set up a wifi interface from the CLI, 
and assuming you're using WPA (or WPA2), you need to be running 
wpa_supplicant.

This is a daemon with a config file; it's powerful but a bit of a pain 
for debugging as you have to keep editing the config file and restarting 
the daemon: there isn't (as far as I can tell) a simple way to do a 
one-shot equivalent of
  iwconfig wlan0 essid MYNETWORK key PASSWORD
on a WPA network.

Debian also has /etc/network/interfaces if you don't want to use
network-manager - this does work with WPA.


----

Aside: if you're trying to find a missing command, you probably want to 
install apt-file.

#apt install apt-file
#apt-file update
#apt-file search lspci

(dpkg -S is great at telling you "Which of my installed packages is 
responsible for a particular file on my system", but cannot be used to 
answer "which package should I install if I want to get a particular file")


HTH,

Richard