I usually boot up my ubuntu box with gnome, but sometimes I want to play UT (on a bare x server) or I just want to use my laptop as a server. In those cases I don’t boot into Gnome but into the terminal. But the problem is Gnome manages my wireless network card. So no Gnome, no connection.

Some months ago I started searching for a solution for this. I found several options like guessnet, whereami, et cetera. I first tried whereami. But that wasn’t a success. I required to much configuration and didn’t really felt polished at all.

I stumbled upon guessnet last week. I found it in a thread on ubuntuforums. I installed it and after some fiddling with it, I couldn’t get it to work properly. I asked some questions on the forum (nobody answered). So I had to solve it myself. After some trial and error, I managed to come up with a working configuration.

Sorry about the indenting not working. It’s this stupid highlighting plugin that does not behave properly.

My original “/etc/network/interfaces”:

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auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

My working config:

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auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
mapping wlan0
script guessnet-ifupdown
map default: none
map autofilter: true #Look for wlan0- interfaces
map timeout: 9
map init-time: 9 #For slow drivers
map verbose: true
map debug: true

iface wlan0-home inet dhcp
test wireless essid USR5464
wireless-essid USR5464

iface wlan0-tim inet dhcp
test wireless essid Tim_online closed
wpa-psk 234243242342424
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-ssid Tim_online

#If all else fails: pick an open network
iface wlan0-open inet dhcp
test wireless open
wireless-essid any
wireless-mode auto

In the configuration above, the Tim_online network uses wpa security. WPA2 is available too if you want to. Just search the net for it. The interface sections are ordinary /etc/network/interfaces configurations. Except for the “test” statement. This is guessnet specific.

I installed the newer package from Debian unstable. Just to make sure it wouldn’t work due to some obscure bug.

The only drawback is that the network applet in Gnome doesn’t show the wireless connection anymore. So I can’t see what network I’m connected to. For that I have to fire up the terminal (iwconfig).

If you have some questions about it: just leave a comment.