always considered myself an ace of the command line... heck for some time i even used X only for webbrowser (while cursing) and used TTY1 for vim and TTY2 for a shell where i'd run version control commands and build...
but yesterday, installing debian-testing on a new notebook, the radeon cards didn't worked out even with the vesa drivers and i had to use the console for a few hours...
i panicked when i realized I had no idea how to bring the wifi up.
...and everytime something like this happens (previous one was some punk changing the kernel parameter "single" or "1" or "init 1" to "text")... i feel old and outdated. it hurts.
I find wifi on the command is still surprisingly hard if using just primitives like iproute2. I'm trying to force myself to use just that for a bit to learn the new(ish) ip / iw commands.
Really, though, wpa_supplicant seems to be the most troublesome critical wireless "primitive". Not fun command line syntax.
I found about this problem when moving from gnome to a minimalistic window manager that had no task bar whatsoever. I now use cnetworkmanager which is a python cmd application that uses dbus to connect with the regular NetworkManager service in Ubuntu, but for a couple of minutes it was a weird feeling, not being able to do something this basic
You might consider switching to a lightweight distribution like Arch. Distributions intended to be used from the command line give you tools to make these tasks easier.
but yesterday, installing debian-testing on a new notebook, the radeon cards didn't worked out even with the vesa drivers and i had to use the console for a few hours...
i panicked when i realized I had no idea how to bring the wifi up.
...and everytime something like this happens (previous one was some punk changing the kernel parameter "single" or "1" or "init 1" to "text")... i feel old and outdated. it hurts.