Make has a tutorial up for configuring wifi for your BeagleBone Black.

So you’ve updated your BeagleBone Black to the latest version of Debian (see my how-to guide for OSX and Windows users) and you’re ready to begin prototyping your next project with this embedded Linux board. But you’d really like that next project to be easy to move around. It really should have wi-fi.

You plug in your wi-fi adapter and … oh right, this is Linux. You’ll need to manually configure the adapter to automatically connect with your network.

How best to do that? Well, assuming, like me, you don’t have a KVM for your BeagleBone, you must instead rely on SSH to communicate with your board.

Looking around at a few guides I found the steps were either outdated or seemed unnecessarily complicated. As soon as a guide told me I had to apt-get any software I didn’t believe it. All the tools for configuring wi-fi are already built in to Linux. It should be easy.

I rebuilt Debian a few times, always with an eye to simplify the process. I eventually narrowed it down to these few steps, in what amounts to only five quick commands executed from Terminal or PuTTY.

In the images below you’ll also notice I’m using a USB hub. Plugging the wi-fi adapter directly into the BeagleBone Black will cause errors, due to the amount of current the wi-fi adapter draws. Thus I’m also using a power adapter that can supply the necessary current, and a USB hub to plug the wi-fi adapter into. I consider both of these components absolutely necessary for this project to work as designed.

See the full tutorial here.

Each Tuesday is BeagleBone Black Day here at Adafruit! What is the BeagleBone? The BeagleBones are a line of affordable single-board Linux computers (SBCs) created by Texas Instruments. New to the Bone? Grab one of our Adafruit BeagleBone Black Starter Packs and check out our extensive resources available on the Adafruit Learning System including a guide to setting up the Adafruit BeagleBone IO Python Library. We have a number of Bone accessories including add-on shields (called “capes”) and USB devices to help you do even more with your SBC. Need a nice display to go along with your Bone? Check out our fine selection of HDMI displays, we’ve tested all of them with the Beagle Bone Black!