You might have faced to have your laptop that doesn’t boot with your nice GUI interface, with Network Manager that handles your wifi connection. Maybe due to a failed update or a broken package.

Well, it happened to me exactly for that reason: some issues with an upgrade. And how can you fix a broken package or dependency without internet connection?

Oooh yes, that’s a nightmare! Thankfully, I found this handy article, which I will list some handy commands, that did help me in restoring the connection on my laptop, allowing me to fix the upgrade and restore its functionality.

NOTE: I had iwconfig and wpasupplicant already installed. If not, I should have downloaded the packages and all their dependencies and manually install them with dpkg -i command

Identify what’s the name of your wifi interface

iwconfig

This should return something like wlp4s0

Guessing that you know already the SSID (e.g. HomeFancyWiFi) of your wifi and the password (e.g. myWiFiPassw0rd), you can run directly this command:

wpa_passphrase HomeFancyWiFi myWiFiPassw0rd | sudo tee /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -i wlp4s0


This will generate the config file, connect to the wifi. Once you see that all works as expected, you could use the -B flag to put the wpa_suppicant in background and release the terminal.

wpa_supplicant -B -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -i wlp4s0

Alternatively, you can move to another tab (ALT+F1,F2,F3… in the text mode console), and run dhcpclient to get an IP and the DNS set.

dhclient wlp4s0

Once done, you can run iwconfig just to verify that the interface has the IP and do some basic network troubleshooting like ping etc to make sure all works, and you can go back to fix your broken upgrade 🙂