WiFi

On of more asked question in this blog, is “how do i enable wifi on Minibian?”

The reason because wifi support is not preinstalld by design, is that the philosopy of Minibian is to have a really minimal distribution, but in order to make wifi working out of the box every wifi adapter firmware should have been installed, and the idea to do this seems really bad and we prefer that users install only the software they really needed it.

So installing wifi is not difficult and not so different than in the official Raspbian Image, you just have to install the needed packages:

First check your wifi adapter model and identify the chipset (there are many methods for doing this, you can install the package usbutils and then check with “lsusb” or you can search for your model here.
After this you have to install the appropriate firmware (in this example for realtek-based adapter Asus N10, we will use “firmware-realtek”, for atheros chips you can use “firmware-atheros”, for ralink “firmware-ralink” and so on):

apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-realtek

Then you have to install wpasupplicant, a package managing wpa/wpa2 wifi connection

apt-get install wpasupplicant

Proceed with usual wifi configuration, editing your /etc/network/interfaces like this

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

Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf fitting your wifi network

network={
ssid="yourssid"
psk="yourpassword"
}

Finally you can reboot, and you will be connected to wifi network.
You can optionally apt-get install iw crda wireless-regdb in order to avoid boot crda warning, and apt-get install wireless-tools if you want some usefull command-line wireless tools.