The wireless tools

These tools are a collection of user-space utilities written to support the configuration of the WLAN devices and some related aspects of networking using the Linux Wireless Extension.

Note

The Linux Wireless Extension is a generic API that allows a driver to expose to the user-space configuration and statistics specific to common WLAN devices. Further information on this topic can be accessed at:  http://www.labs.hpe.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html .

They are held in the wireless-tools package, and they should be already installed in the Wandboard (otherwise, we can install them as usual).

One of the most important tools of this collection is iwconfig, which is used to manipulate the basic wireless parameters. As reported in the command's description, the iwconfig command is very similar to ifconfig. In fact, it can be used in a similar manner to get basic information of our WLAN, as shown here:

root@wb:~# iwconfig wlan0
wlan0     IEEE 802.11abgn ...