Automatically Connect To A WPA Protected Access Point at Boot

A prerequisite is to read the instructions here: Easy Way: wicd.
To use this guide, one must follow the instructions under the More Advanced Setup: using wireless tools section and the Connecting to a WPA-PSK secured access point.

Specifically you must have a “wpa_configure.conf” file and these commands must connect you to the desired access point.

wpa_supplicant -i*interface* -c/opt/wpa_configure.conf &
udhcpc -i *interface*

We need to find the absolute locations of 2 commands wpa_supplicant and udhcpc.

We can do this using the find command.

find / -name'filename' 2> /dev/null

For me:

find / -name 'wpa_supplicant' 2> /dev/null

Results in:

/tmp/tcloop/wpa_supplicant
/tmp/tcloop/wpa_supplicant/usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant
/usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant
/usr/local/tce.installed/wpa_supplicant

And

find / -name'udhcpc' 2> /dev/null

Results in:

/sbin/udhcpc
/usr/share/udhcpc

So I write down the two file locations: /usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant and /sbin/udhcpc

You should have a file named wpa_configure.conf. This file needs to be persistent between reboots.
Thus you must store it a place that is saved between reboots. These locations are specified in the file /opt/.filetool.lst.
I chose to keep my wpa_configure.conf file in the /opt directory, but you can save it anywhere as long as that location persists between reboots.

Finally we need to tell Tiny Core that we want to run these specific commands at boot.
Thus we will need to append to our bootlocal.sh file which can be found in the /opt directory.

Lets open up a text editor and add these 3 lines:

# Setup Wireless
/your/path/to/wpa_supplicant -i[wireless adapter] -c[location of wpa_configure.conf] &
/your/path/to/udhcpc -i [wireless adapter] &

• The first line is just an optional comment to remind us what these 2 lines do.
• My [wireless adapter] = wlan0
• My /path/to/wpa_supplicant = /usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant
• My /path/to/wpa_configure.conf = /opt/wpa.conf
• My /path/to/udhcpc = /sbin/udhcpc
• The “ &” tells the command to run in the background which is what we want.

So my bootlocal.sh file additions look like:

# Setup Wireless
/usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/opt/wpa.conf &
/sbin/udhcpc -i wlan0 &