I knew I was going to have to switch my Desktop from Ethernet to Wifi, so I made sure the kernel was updated for Wifi and I had the Wifi card ID'd with correct drivers/firmware.
But... time was against me. I ended up finding an Ethernet cable I could directly connect to the Wifi box. Problem being I never got the start to finish process getting Wifi on
Gentoo Linux working.
Fast forward a week and I have no choice. My only option is to try surfing for tutorials on
Gentoo Wifi on my phone while typing commands on a keyboard on the floor. Bottom line? I had set up the kernel correctly for my card, but I had no Wifi
Linux tools installed.
So... I ran the emerge command to install wpa_supplicant and noted all the errors with package URLs
emerge -fpav wpa_supplicant
(f=fetch, p=pretend, a=ask, v=verbose)
Then I used wget to download the files (including all dependencies) in Windows WSL(1)
Copied the tarballs to /var/cache/distfiles/
chown portage:portage /var/cache/distfiles/wpa_supplicant-2.9*
change ownership to portage
did a normal emerge and it happily installed from the new local files!
emerge -av wpa_supplicant
created a wpa passphrase file
wpa_passphrase "My SSID" > /etc/wpa.conf
chmod -v 600 /etc/wpa.conf
then just ran the incredibly simple command (sarcasm)
wpa_supplicant -Dnl80211,wext -iwlp5s0 -c/etc/wpa.conf -B
restarted dhcpcd
rc-service dhcpcd restart
and I could finally get my email!
(Wifi was from my Pixel Hot-spot with no idea how much data was left!)
Then... well, stay tuned for more
