The best way to avoid falling into that trap is to configure your Raspberry Pi for remote access. Once you have that configured, however, you still need to know how to do tasks remotely that would previously be handled by a GUI interface (like turning on the Wi-Fi). Today we’re going to walk you through the technical (but simple) way to remotely connect to your Pi and activate a Wi-Fi add-on dongle.

What You Need?

For this tutorial you’ll need the following items:

Step 1.

Boot the Raspberry Pi without the WiFi adapter plugged in.

Step 2.

Open a Terminal session by clicking on the LXTerminal icon, and enter the following command into it:

Step 3.

This opens an editor screen of the wifi configuration file you need to change.

Step 4.

When you have finished press [ctrl]x. This will ask if you want to save the modified files. Press ‘Y’ and then Return to save the file with the same name.

Step 5.

Shut down your Raspberry Pi, plug the WiFi adapter in and start it up again. You should find that the Raspberry Pi connects using the WiFi adapter as it boots up.

Done by: Leen Al-Khalifa