Enabling Wifi in Raspbian
I’ve started playing around with a Raspberry Pi recently. It’s pretty slick, but there are a few gotchas I’ve run into, particularly regarding wifi.
I’m using a Model B Raspberry Pi which came with a USB wifi dongle, since my TV and router are not in the same room.
With raspbmc, it asks for your ssid and passphrase, but with an image like raspian, you have to configure the settings yourself. It’s not too bad, but the documentation I searched for was not very helpful or clear.
This worked for me. Here’s is what my /etc/network/interfaces looks like:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "YourSSIDGoesInHere"
wpa-psk "YourWifiPassphraseGoesInHere"
After that, run this to reboot the pi:
sudo reboot
Once it starts back up you should see a message displaying your pi’s new IP address handed out from your router displayed during boot.