If you have a wireless network card, and you've gotten it working, maybe you haven't yet figured out how to scan for access points yet. If you are using a slick desktop distro that does all kinds of cool stuff for you, it might already be working and you didn't have to do anything for it, but we are going to learn how to do it from the command line because we are a lot more likely to be able to get it working on every Linux box we come to this way and we also have a chance to learn more about the subject while we are doing it.

Before you get started, you'll need to install the "wireless-tools" package for your distro. I use Debian, and the command is

apt-get install wireless-tools

with root priviledges, of course. If you use some other non-Debian distro, you should either search for a package of a similar name or one that contains the "iw" programs (eg, iwconfig, iwlist, iwevent, etc.)

First, to scan for wireless access points, your wireless NIC interface should be up. You can bring it up in whatever way your desktop choice provides, or you can bring it up using the interface name (eg. eth1, wlan0, etc. mine is named "wireless") with the following command.

ifconfig up wireless