[Scottish] Connect to a network from CLI

[Jason Irwin]

I've got Ubuntu 10.10 running on an old laptop and every now and again it
has a grump with X and is a pain in the arse (pretty sure it's a loose
connection as sometimes the BIOS moans it can't find any video).  Anyway, I
can usually get to TTY which is cool.

 

So I am sat in a cafe thinking "TTY's not so bad, I've got w3m installed and
I just want to read the news anyway..." and that's where I came unstuck.
Could I figure out how to connect to a network from the CLI?  Could I
buggery.  The cafe's network was already known to "Network Manager"*, so is
there any handy-dandy command line kung-fu I can apply to use that
definition?  Or will I have to go the long-way-round and use
"wpa_supplicant" or something?

 

Cheers,

 

J.

*And why doesn't "Network Manager" let you select a network definition and
force a connection attempt?  Urf.