Wireless Tools For Linux

Wireless Tools is an open source, free, easy-to-use and easy-to-install software project, a collection of command-line utilities that promise to help new Linux users to effortlessly configure Wi-Fi (Wireless) network cards (interfaces) on their computers.

Seven commands are included in this package. With them, you will be able to easily manipulate the Wireless extensions (modules) found in the Linux kernel package, in order to connect to wireless networks.

Wireless Tools includes the ‘iwconfig’ command for manipulating basic wireless parameters, the ‘iwlist’ command for scanning and listing frequencies, encryption keys and bit-rates, and the ‘iwspy’ command for getting per node link quality.

The ‘ifrename’ command is included so you can easily manipulate name interfaces, as well as the ‘iwpriv’ command for manipulating the Wireless extensions specific to a driver. The ‘iwevent’ and ‘iwgetid’ commands are also included.

To install and use all the aforementioned commands in your GNU/Linux operating system, you must download the latest version of the project from Softpedia or via its official website (see link at the end of the article), where it’s distributed as a source tarball.

Save the archive on a location of your choice, extract its contents using your favorite archive manager utility, open the Terminal app (terminal emulator) and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/wireless_tools.29).

Run the ‘make’ command to compile all the commands included in the Wireless Tools package. After a successful compilation process, run the ‘sudo make install’ as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root to install them system wide.

To see what options each command includes, add the ‘--help’ parameter to the end of the respective command(s). Detailed information can also be found on the project’s homepage.