No way for WiFi in Kali Mate 2017

[dojero]

The Kali Mate 2017 iso apparently does not have any way to initiate a wifi connection with a WPA secured network. Not only is there no NetworkManager or WICD installed, there is also no wpa_supplicant installed. So even trying to connect to a system manually (using iw, iwconfig, ip, etc) is impossible.

This is an odd oversight. Kali LXDE 2017, by contrast, has WICD and wpa_supplicant installed. So booting the live system from the LXDE iso allows a user to access the Internet with Wifi. Kali Mate doesn't. To make wpa-secured wifi work with Mate, you need to first connect using an ethernet cable. Once you've got that connection, you can presumably download wpa_supplicant, install it, and then set up wifi. That's more than an inconvenience, I think.

Does anyone know why this is true?

[_defalt]

Maybe network manager is installed and it may not have wifi drivers of your adapter. Which wifi adapter do you use?

[dojero]

Network manager is not installed. It has nothing to do with my wifi drivers. As I said, Kali LXDE's WICD works perfectly. Network manager doesn't exist on the Mate Kali system. More important, wpa_supplicant doesn't exist. This is crucial for wifi that uses WPA security. Even if Network Manager were there (it isn't), it wouldn't be able to work without wpa_supplicant. My wifi is a Ralink RT3290. But again, this is completely irrelevant.

For those interested, the solution was tedious. After booting in any live Debian distro, I ran aptitude download <package name> for wpa_supplicant (and any of its dependencies you don't have). I then mounted the hard drive of the computer I was using and copied those deb files to that drive. Then booted back into Kali Mate 2017, mounted the hard drive, and copied the deb packages over to the Kali live drive. From there, I installed them using dpkg. Once that was done, wpa_passphrase and wpa_supplicant worked and a connection to the wifi network was made.

If anyone needs more details, reply here.

[Sublimefly]

Network manager is not installed. It has nothing to do with my wifi drivers. As I said, Kali LXDE's WICD works perfectly. Network manager doesn't exist on the Mate Kali system. More important, wpa_supplicant doesn't exist. This is crucial for wifi that uses WPA security. Even if Network Manager were there (it isn't), it wouldn't be able to work without wpa_supplicant. My wifi is a Ralink RT3290. But again, this is completely irrelevant.

For those interested, the solution was tedious. After booting in any live Debian distro, I ran aptitude download <package name> for wpa_supplicant (and any of its dependencies you don't have). I then mounted the hard drive of the computer I was using and copied those deb files to that drive. Then booted back into Kali Mate 2017, mounted the hard drive, and copied the deb packages over to the Kali live drive. From there, I installed them using dpkg. Once that was done, wpa_passphrase and wpa_supplicant worked and a connection to the wifi network was made.

If anyone needs more details, reply here.

I too have experience this issue with a broadcom chip set on a 2011 Macbook Pro 8,2. I ran into a number of issues from LAN not functioning to video drivers failing, but have no issues other than 5ghz missing from Kali 64bit 2017.1 on that same laptop using the same install method. Seems the mate build may not be fully functional with as many hardware variations as the standard build. Thankfully as much as I love the Mate desktop, I prefer Kali defaults with slight modifications.

[dojero]

Again, I'm not sure why this is being made more complicated than it is. While there may well be other problems with hardware recognition with a Kali install, those problems have nothing to do with the omission of wpa_supplicant from the installed packages of Kali's Mate OS. I don't understand why responses on this thread keep talking about hardware. That's not the subject of the thread. The problem discussed here is the problem of a Kali iso for Mate that does not include wpa_supplicant as one of the packages.