WIRELESS(7) Linux Programmer's Manual WIRELESS(7)

wireless - Wireless Tools and Wireless Extensions

iwconfig
iwpriv -a

The Wireless Extensions is an API allowing you manipulate Wireless LAN networking interfaces. It is composed of a variety of tools and configuration files. It is documented in more detail in the Linux Wireless LAN Howto.
The Wireless Tools are used to change the configuration of wireless LAN networking interfaces on the fly, to get their current configuration, to get statistics and diagnose them. They are described in their own man page, see below for references.
Wireless configuration is specific to each Linux distribution. This man page will contain in the future the configuration procedure for a few common distributions. For the time being, check the file DISTRIBUTIONS.txt included with the Wireless Tools package.

In Debian 3.0 (and later) you can configure wireless LAN networking devices using the network configuration tool ifupdown(8).

/etc/network/interfaces
wireless-<function> <value>
wireless-essid Home
wireless-mode Ad-Hoc
/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools
/usr/share/doc/wireless-tools/README.Debian

SuSE 8.0 (and later) has integrated wireless configuration in their network scripts.

Yast2
/etc/sysconfig/network/wireless
/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-*
WIRELESS_<function>=<value>
WIRELESS_ESSID="Home"
WIRELESS_MODE=Ad-Hoc
man ifup
info scpm

If you are using the original configuration scripts from the Pcmcia package, you can use this method.

/etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts
*,*,*,*)
ESSID="Home"
MODE="Ad-Hoc"
;;
/etc/pcmcia/wireless
File PCMCIA.txt part of Wireless Tools package

Jean Tourrilhes - jt@hpl.hp.com
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

iwconfig(8), iwlist(8), iwspy(8), iwpriv(8), iwevent(8).

4 March 2004 wireless-tools