"More people than ever are using wireless networks as their
primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11
that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both
GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a
desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great
functionality. But, what if you aren't running X11 and want to
manage your wireless card? I don't cover how to install and
activate your card here (for that, take a look at projects like
madwifi or ndiswrapper). I assume your card is installed and
configured properly, and that it is called wlan0. Most of the
utilities mentioned below need to talk directly to your wireless
card (or at least the card driver), so they need to be run with
root privileges (just remember to use sudo)."