Hello the list! I have a Mini-ITX PC, a few months old, running KDE on Stretch.
When I installed it, I used a Stretch netinst image burned to a USB stick and had the wired ethernet plugged in, for speed during the installation. (and also because I didn't know what fun and games I'd end up having with firmware if I tried to install with WiFi). After the duly-installed machine was located in its final home, well out of reach of ethernet cables, I set up the WiFi using native KDE network tool thingy (bottom right corner of the screen). This works but has the, to me significant, disadvantage that if a user has not logged into the machine, it is not connected to the network. So I can't fire up the machine and then log into it remotely from my other computers to do remote maintenance etc. It also seems to lose the network when the machine locks, but I am not sure about this, as the machine is right on the edge of the WiFi router's range, so it could be just getting lost when it goes quiet. I have purchased a WiFi extension and will be setting it up once I have networking more comfortably installed on this box. So, what I'd like to do, is set up WiFi networking on this box the "right", up to date, "Debian" way, so it becomes available on boot and doesn't require someone to have logged into KDE before the machine can be accessed remotely. I'm somewhat aware of systemd-networkd, and I know that it is super-easy to set up a DHCP-based wired ethernet connection that way, and I also know it is possible to do so with a WiFi connection too -- but I strongly suspect that is not the "Debian way". The WiFi connection is secured with a password, and my access point is also a DHCP server. I'm expecting to use DHCP to get an IP address as I do with all other machines on my network. All my past Debian experience of setting up WiFi is pre-systemd / pre-stretch, and a long time in my past so I have forgotten more than I ever knew :) Outside Debian, I've done it on LFS using systemd-networkd -- I know that can be made to work but it doesn't seem very Debianesque to me. Any suggestions on what I should do to set this up? TIA Mark