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Easy wireless networking in Ubuntu Edgy

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Operating Systems, Software

Ubuntu 6.10 natively doesn’t handle connections to WPA-encrypted wireless networks too well. In fact, I wasn’t impressed with the way Edgy handles connecting to any network, for that matter.

For someone who is used to the ‘Network Connections’ folder in Windows, networking in Ubuntu isn’t fun. I worked on trying to connect to my home wireless network for about 90 minutes before I found the right combination of settings on Google that let me get online with WPA, and made it easy to manage multiple networks. For anyone who needs to admin several networks, this is a mandatory feature that Edgy doesn’t natively have.

Here’s how to get a very easy-to-use networking utility in Edgy:

• Connect to the internet via the RJ45 (ethernet) port with a wire. Make sure you can get to Google, etc.
• Click Applications > Accessories > Terminal (don’t get scared)
• type the following and hit enter
  • sudo apt-get
• enter your password and hit enter
• now copy and paste the following block into the terminal window and hit enter. (Note: if it says it can’t find the packages, type in ‘sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list’, remove the “#” from the addresses at the end of each paragraph, save and close)
  • sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
    sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager
    sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
    (press enter to make the last one go)
• a file is now open. get rid of anything that doesn’t have ‘lo’ in it. Save and close.
• Enter this into the Terminal:
  • sudo gedit /etc/default/wpasupplicant

  a file is now open. Type in:

  • ENABLED=0
• Save and close.
• Paste this block into the Terminal. The machine will restart. Don’t forget to come back!
  • sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant
    sudo reboot
    (press enter)

OK, so now you’ve got two icons in the top bar, one is the old ‘two monitors’, and the new ‘bars’ icon. Right-click the ‘two monitors’ one and remove it, you won’t need it. Now left-click the bars and configure your networks!

modified from DebianAdmin

Also,  if you’re a network or server administrator, and you want to use the machine names to remote into servers, you’ll notice it doesn’t work in Ubuntu.  WINS isn’t enabled by default.  Luckily, it’s simple to fix. Open up the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type this in:

sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Where it says ‘hosts: files dns’, add “wins” on, so it says ‘hosts: files dns wins’.  Save and close.

Now give the terminal a:

sudo apt-get install winbind

You should be able to connect via machine name now!  I find this a lot easier than asking people to look up their IP address, we name our machines by asset tag, which makes remote administration a snap!

Comments (4) | February 6th, 2007

4 Responses to “Easy wireless networking in Ubuntu Edgy”

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