Configuring Wifi on your Raspberry Pi

There are many ways how to configure wifi on the Raspberry Pi. Most of them are complicated and messy. I found this solution the easiest to apply. One important thing is, that this will not work with a hidden wifi. You will always have to broadcast your network’s ssid.

Connect to you Pi via ssh and type

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

You should see something like this

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Edit it this way

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "YOUR_NETWORK_SSID_HERE"
wpa-psk "YOUR_WIFI_PASSOWRD_HERE"

Finally unplug your network cable, reboot your Pi and check ifconfig if you have an active wifi connection.

sudo reboot
ifconfig

ifconfig should return something like this. The important thing is to see an assigned IP address in the wlan0 section.

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr b8:27:eb:95:4d:5d
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 80:1f:02:97:4e:c2
          inet addr:10.0.1.6  Bcast:10.0.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:3692 errors:0 dropped:3978 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:402 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:356570 (348.2 KiB)  TX bytes:55122 (53.8 KiB)

Troubleshooting

  • Is your network not hidden?
  • It does not work without a password
  • Are the password and the ssid with double brackets?

Published: July 11 2013

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