Arch Install wpa_supplicant from live arch to installed arch

Question

I have arch installed on my hd, but I can't establish a WPA2-encrypted network connection because wpa_supplicant is not installed. On my arch live-usb there is wpa_supplicant and there I can establish the network connection.

Is there any way to tell pacman of my live arch to install the wpa_supllicant package to my installed arch on /mnt ?

Solution

Reading the pacman man page, it looks to me like you could do this:

pacman --root /mnt -S wpa_supplicant

while you have the "live Arch" CD booted, and the "/" partitioned mounted on /mnt. That might be a little more complicated if you have a separate /usr partition.

You'll probably have to fix up the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file after you've rebooted from the HD, or fix it up in /mnt/ before the reboot.

UPDATE 2017-04-02

Either Arch or systemd has changed. Here's what you do now:

1. Find wireless device name, use ip a or ifconfig -a Mine is wlp12s0, USB wireless adaptors look like wlp26f7u3
2. Start wpa_supplicant: systemctl enable wpa_supplicant; systemctl start wpa_supplicant. This is the master process, or maybe I'm just superstitious.
3. Make a wpa_supplicant.conf@wirelessdevicename file in /etc/wpa_supplicant. For my laptop, this is wpa_supplicant-wlp12s0.conf and I believe I just did cp wpa_supplicant.conf wpa_supplicant-wlp12s0.conf There will exist a separate config file for each interface you start this way, and they can be configured differently.
4. Start wpa_supplicant for that inteface. For me, this looked like: systemctl enable wpa_supplicant@wlp12s0; systemctl start wpa_supplicant@wlp12s0 You device name will vary.

It might help debug if you have journalctl -f running in a separate terminal.

Comments

[jeremyjjbrown]

"Start wpa_supplicant" How do you start it when it's not installed?

[Admin]

@jeremyjjbrown - I gave the command at the top of my answer: pacman --root /mnt -S wpa_supplicant

[jeremyjjbrown]

Thanks @Bruce . Turns out I was having a network issue and pacman is not good at dealing with flaky networks.