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I am connecting a Raspberry Pi with laptop via Ethernet cable, and I am able to do SSH by PuTTY and Xming. If I do ifconfig in the pi's command line interface, it shows only l0 and eth0, no wlan0.

In many posts people suggested downloading network adapter but all posts are for a wifi dongle not for an ethernet cable.

dhruvvyas90
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tsoulb
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    And your question is ....? – Milliways Sep 01 '15 at 11:10
  • what i have to do , so that i can see wlan0 if i do ifconfig in pi's CLI ? – tsoulb Sep 01 '15 at 11:12
  • What are you using for WiFi?What does lsusb show? – Milliways Sep 01 '15 at 11:16
  • I am using dlink home WiFi and laptop is connected to it. For lsusb i will comment once i reach home and connect to pi. Thanks – tsoulb Sep 01 '15 at 11:22
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    Your question is not clear to me. You are able to connect to your laptop via PuTTY because it's connected with ethernet to your laptop. Wired ethernet is eth0. Are you trying to diagnose problems with your wifi on the RPi? I would start by running dmesg and see if you can find an entry for your wifi adapter in the logs. – berto Sep 01 '15 at 12:15
  • I followed below link for sharing laptop's wifi with rpi https://anwaarullah.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/sharing-wifi-internet-connection-with-raspberry-pi-through-lanethernet-headless-mode/ following the link i am able to do ssh and can communicate with rpi but failed with internet sharing.I misunderstood that wlan0 is absent in rpi (my thought was - as rpi will be connected to wifi shared by laptop it should have wlan0 in it ) that's why its failing internet sharing ,then i posted this question. From Huygens comment i understood,untill i have usb dongle,wlan0 set up is not necessary. – tsoulb Sep 02 '15 at 18:18
  • i am still trouble shooting for wifi connectivity ! Also confused with the two kinds of ip sets used for connectivity with rpi 1st is 169.254.241.x (i am using this now and able to do ssh but no internet) other is static ip concept 192.168.1.x for which i am unable to get ip address for rpi,can any1 please explain the technical aspects and differences of the two ip set and their working ,and how i can connect with current set up ,spent 2 weeks now, glad to learn – tsoulb Sep 02 '15 at 18:21

2 Answers2

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As suggested in the comments you should check output of lsusb and you will see that there isn't a wireless dongle connected, otherwise you should see wlan0, wlan1, .. as many as connected wifi dongles with their specific hardware addresses. You cannot expect wlan0 to appear as you plug in an Ethernet cable.

Tolga Varol
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In Linux (which is actually the kernel of the OS you are running on your Raspberry Pi) a network interface named eth0 is a wire network interface. So the cable you plug in your RPi on one end, and probably on your router (or a switch) on the other end, is called an Ethernet cable (or network cable).

So if you are using the Ethernet cable (even if plug to a "WiFi" router), it is not using WiFi so you want find a wlan0 to configure but you need to configure eth0.

If now you plug a WiFi card on the USB port (e.g. a USB WiFi dongle) and this WiFi card has a driver for Linux (actually called a module), then you will see a new interface called wlan0. But if you don't have one, of course there won't be one interface with such a name.

I know it is also possible to get a WiFi board via the GPIO ports, but I'm not sure if you will see a wlan0 then. Anyway, this is a bit more "advanced" and probably easier to just use a USB dongle!

Huygens
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