PandaBoard: Setting up Wifi on the comand line (Ubuntu)

If you want to set up Wifi from the command line (it might be the only way to install a desktop for example) you will need to edit the following file:

/etc/network/interfaces 

If you don't know how to use vim or other command line text editors and just want to edit the file, try installing nano this needs an Internet connection though),with:

sudo apt-get install nano

Nano is fairly obvious as it follows normal GUI based methodologies.

Now you can use nano (or any other text editor, just substitute it for 'nano' in the below command) to edit the interfaces file:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

To determine what entries should go into this file review the options at this page:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834

My interfaces file looks like the following (I am using WPA2 security):

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-driver wext
wpa-ssid <--NAME OF AP-->
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-proto RSN
wpa-pairwise CCMP
wpa-group CCMP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk <--INSERT KEY XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-->

The items in green above are placeholders for your security settings. You need to replace them with


Once you have completed the amendments to the interfaces file and want to test the setup enter the following command to restart the networking services:

sudo service networking restart

If that all goes well, check the interface is working (up) with this command:

ifconfig wlan0

Hopefully some traffic is reported to have taken place and that an IPv4 address has been allocated.

If not, check the dmesg log for error messages:

dmesg

Finally to test everything is working, try pinging a site, for example:

ping www.google.com