rPi Wireless Setup Help

Hi,
I've been looking over the forum and the HM wiki and can't find what I need to setup the wireless networking w/ the rPi. I've seen a few posts where people have edited the /etc/config/network and /etc/config/wireless files but don't quite understand exactly what I need to do or what the different options mean. I also accessed the wireless setup through luci to try and setup thru the gui but am not sure what settings that I may need. There are so many options - ESSID, Mode, BSSID, wireless security tab, etc and I don't have enough knowledge of networking to understand it all. I'm guessing the luci interface will update the /etc/config/network & wireless files so I can setup my wireless either way.

Can someone point me in the direction of an URL or some reading to better understand what all of this means or how to setup?

Once I get this all setup on my home network, I probably will have more questions if I take my BBQ away from home and how to setup & access but that's another matter completely.

I ended up setting mine up via Luci / GUI, even though I'm mostly comfortable monkeying with the config files manually.

A couple things I found:

1. It seemed that powering everything via the cell phone charger / micro USB route didn't give me enough juice to run everything. The LCD would fade out when the unit had network traffic (even Ethernet) and the wifi dongle wouldn't power up at all.

2. Once I got the 12v wall wart to power everything, I ended up needing to reflash to the base install. This time when it started up it recognized the wifi and I had a "wifi" tab in the network portion of the admin. I was able to scan and log onto my network the same way any other wifi device would.

Finally, once I had the wifi up and running I had to set the wired connection to NOT start at boot time, otherwise it took precedence over the wifi. I may have been able to get a priority set on them, but I wanted to monitor the ribs I already had cooking.

Hope that helps!

Jarrod

I've got a wifi tab within Luci but am almost positive I didn't have a simple scan and add password type interface. There were a lot of configurable options but I didn't know what they all meant.

I'll see if I can take a screenshot and upload. I'm going to spend tomorrow reading more about the networking config files so I'll have a better understanding of all the different options and how it all works together.

I've posted a full picture HOWTO WiFi.

Bryan, thanks for the HOWTO. I'm up and running. I don't know how I missed the scan button. Maybe I've been staring at the screen too long!