This is pretty straight­for­ward with a cou­ple of quirks. Installing sta­ble (squeeze) using the wifi was pos­si­ble but I had to tem­porar­ily con­fig­ure my router to use WEP (instead of WPA2/PSK) before I could get a connection.

Net­work options dur­ing install

Then after instal­la­tion, the wifi had dis­ap­peared. I could’ve inves­ti­gated, and this post cer­tainly sug­gests that it is fix­able, but installing sta­ble had been an acci­dent. Since I had a clean install, there wasn’t any­thing to lose. I went back to Old Kent Road, and threw the dice again. The cur­rent test­ing release is wheezy, so I decided to give that a blast.

The wifi options were slightly dif­fer­ent this time. I was offered WPA2 and even though I had to man­u­ally enter the SSID of the router, net­work con­nec­tiv­ity was a breeze.

Debian Wheezy Install

I’d read that it was pos­si­ble to con­fig­ure the IP address man­u­ally by select­ing expert install so I chose that route and got a ver­bose and inter­est­ing jour­ney through the install, which was, on the whole, a piece of cake.

Eject CD, reboot, and hello Gnome 3. Well we can deal with you later. But first, the net­work. Where’s my wifi gone? I’d used it to install, and now it was gone.

I might have given up around now. I toyed with the set­tings sug­gested here with­out much enthu­si­asm, and thought that LMDE had been work­ing fine, I could just go back. Why make life hard for myself?

And it was a close thing. I knew it was almost cer­tainly pos­si­ble to get the wifi work­ing again — it was just how much tin­ker­ing under the hood was required. It turned out just to be a loose wire, and the fix was really easy. The only dif­fer­ence I found between my sys­tem and the instruc­tions in raghu’s blog, is that the con­fig file is actually:

/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

and not /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf.

So what worked for me was to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf, change:

[ifupdown]
managed=false

to

[ifupdown]
managed=true

then restart the net­work man­ager. i.e.

/etc/init.d/network-manager restart

(or reboot).

And Bob’s your father’s brother.

so thanks for your blog raghu … if I hadn’t stum­bled upon it I’d be back on LMDE.

As it hap­pens, the IP address was allo­cated using DHCP and I had to con­fig­ure it man­u­ally again, so there was no advan­tage to using the ‘expert install’ option.