Does wpa_gui need wpa_supplicant to initialize first to work properly?

Question

I am using Linux on a custom board based on the Freescale MCIMX6Q-SDB (armv71). I installed wpa_gui, a GUI for wpa_supplicant, on the custom board. I'd like to know if I have to initialize wpa_supplicant first before running wpa_gui, for example by doing this:

$  wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

I always see "Could not get status from wpa_supplicant" from wpa_gui whenever I try to start it before initializing wpa_supplicant. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

I found the answer a while ago and I remembered asking this question so here's what I found: wpa_gui uses wpa_supplicant's control interface (/var/run/wpa_supplicant) to interact with it. So in order for wpa_gui to control wpa_supplicant you need to locate wpa_supplicant's DBus service file and modify it by adding the -u (enable DBUs interface) and -O (override ctrl_interface parameter for new interfaces) options.

In my case I have two service files located at /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services, they are namely: fi.w1.wpa_supplicant1.service and fi.epitest.hostap.WPASupplicant.service. I changed the Exec variable in those two files as follows:

Exec=/sbin/wpa_supplicant -u -O/var/run/wpa_supplicant

Here's the wpa_supplicant documentation regarding the DBus control interface: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/documentation/wpa_supplicant#enabling_control_interface_and_nl80211_driver