Manage your wifi networks and profiles with wifi-radar

I have been traveling the last two weeks, and I have found how useful is wifi-radar on my Linux powered laptop.

I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 with an Aironet Wifi internal card (for the records)

As you may see on the wifi-radar home page, there are packages for Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and Suse, I have seen that the Gentoo link is broken, but it is also easy to install on it.

Installing wifi-radar

Gentoo

emerge wifi-radar

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install wifi-radar

Fedora

sudo yum install wifi-radar

The first time you run wifi-radar, it will detect the available networks in that place and list it on the screen, like the screenshot below.

You should create profiles for all connections you may want to connect, and then select the one you want to connect and click on connect, and if all your configuration is OK you will connect to that network.

You can also run it as a daemon to do this run:

sudo wifi-radar -d

Wifi-radar will try to connect to the default networks you have configured, (those with profiles created) if they are available, you can also check the /etc/wifi-radar.conf

This is how mine looks like:

[DEFAULT]
scan_timeout = 2
auto_profile_order = DIPLOMAT6to,DIPLOMAT8vo,ADSL_Wireless
speak_up = False
ifup_required = False
interface = eth0
commit_required = False

[DIPLOMAT6to]
prescript = 
use_wpa = no
postscript = 
mode = auto
key = abcd12346
use_dhcp = yes
security = open
channel = auto

[DIPLOMAT8vo]
prescript = 
use_wpa = no
postscript = 
mode = auto
key = abcd123456
use_dhcp = yes
security = open
channel = auto

[ADSL_Wireless]
prescript = 
use_wpa = no
postscript = 
mode = auto
key = secretkey0
use_dhcp = yes
security = open
channel = auto

Of course it is easier to use the UI interface to start it run:

gksu wifi-radar