How to automatically connect WiFi In Mint 18.3 KDE?

Question

I install Linux Mint on a thumb drive for occasional in-home use as a convenient portable system that doesn't affect the native OS of whatever system I use it on. I'm not too worried about security in my location, and I want to boot and connect to my wireless router with passwords automatically entered.

This was no problem until I just loaded Mint 18.3 KDE. Previous versions would simply remember the WiFi password, although recent versions have required disabling kwallet. With v18.3, however, it took some mucking around to bypass Mint's protecting me from myself; for GUI users, they've buried access to the setting.

I'll post the solution I found as a self-answered question to save other users the headache. Any other solutions are also welcome.

Answer 1

This is the route to the setting that I found (there was no obvious route via the System Settings menu):

• Click the Networks icon in the system tray to bring up the network connections. Then click on the configure network connections icon in the upper right of that window (circled in the image below).

• That opens this window:

• Select the wireless connection and click Edit (circled on the image), which opens this window:

• On the WiFi Security tab, enter the password. Click the icon on the right side of the password and select Store password and make it available for all users (not encrypted). That is not the default setting, and was the only selection that retained the password with kwallet disabled.