Wpa_supplicant in /etc/network/interfaces and Karmic Koala 9.10

Most of you know that Karmic Koala 9.10 released on the 29th October.  I noticed during my test run with Alpha’s and Beta’s of Karmic that my use of wpa_supplicant as described in this article didn’t work any more.

The lines in /etc/network/interfaces have changed from:

wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa-driver wext

to:

pre-up wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

Also if you where using :

wpa_supplicant -Dndiswrapper -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

then this now has to be changed to:

Wireless with wpasupplicant easier then you think

Revised on: 11-16-2008 Changed wpa-driver to wext. Now also working with Kubuntu 8.10 i686 kernel 2.6.27-7-generic

Revised on: 09-01-2008 Now working with Kubuntu 8.04.1 i686 kernel 2.6.24-19-generic and Kubuntu 8.04 x86-64 kernel 2.6.24-19-generic.

Why use wpasupplicant? KNetworkManager works just fine. Yes KNetworkManager is fine but the pass phrase is stored in Kwallet and this means every time you want the network to connect you will have to put in your Kwallet password. Also if you for some reason need wireless to be up without starting the desktop environment you will need wpasupplicant because you will not be able to open up Kwallet in a terminal environment. Wpasupplicant will give you wireless all the time without having to use Kwallet.

As always the methods used here are tested by me and working on my boxes(we have 3 boxes with wireless through wpasupplicant).