With your BBB powered down, plug in one end of an Ethernet cable to the BBB and the other end to your router.

Power up your board via the 5V power supply.

The connection should occur seamlessly, assuming your Ethernet cable is sound, your internet connection is reliable, and the BBB has no defects.

At your screen's login prompts, enter your login name and password. You will be taken to the desktop.

Next, we will check our connection via a terminal session. In the lower left-hand corner of your screen, click on the bird-like icon and then navigate to Accessories | LXTerminal.

In the open terminal window, type the following:

$ ping www.google.com

You should be getting ping responses back that look similar to the following output:

Power up your BBB via 5V DC.

Log in to a desktop session.

In the lower left-hand corner of your screen, click on the bird-like icon and then navigate to Internet | Wicd Network Manager.

In the newly opened window of the application, click on the Switch On Wi-Fi button. The dongle will now begin scanning for accessible networks.

Choose your local network. Enter your password in the popup window according to the type of encryption your network uses. Then, click on OK. After a few moments, your dongle will be connected.

Check the connection with the ping command:

$ ping www.google.com

If all is well, you will be getting solid pingback messages.

From your BBB's desktop, open up LXTerminal.

In the command prompt window, open the file in the directory specified in the following path:

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Among other settings, you should see the following lines in the file's open window:

## WiFi Example
#auto wlan0
#iface wlan0 inet dhcp
#   wpa-ssid "mynetworkname"
#   wpa-psk  "mypassphrase"

With the exception of the first explanatory line, uncomment (which means remove) the # sign at the beginning of each line. To clarify, it should look similar to this:

## WiFi Example
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wpa-ssid "mynetworkname"
   wpa-psk  "mypassphrase"

Change mynetworkname to your Wi-Fi network's name, and mypassphrase to your Wi-Fi password.

Close the file by pressing Ctrl + x; when prompted, type y for yes and then press the return (Enter) key.

Power down the BBB in the terminal window with the following command:

$ sudo poweroff

Power up the board again and log in to your BBB desktop.

You will now get a solid Wi-Fi connection. Test it via the command shell with this command:

$ ping www.google.com

If all went well, you should see a steady screen output from the ping.

We need to create a .conf file for wpa_supplicant, a tool that comes preloaded on the current Debian distribution. The following command line will be useful for this:

$ sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Paste in the open file the following information:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
 ssid="my-ssid"
 scan_ssid=1
 psk="my-psk"
 proto=RSN
 key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
 pairwise=CCMP
 auth_alg=OPEN
}

Two things need to be modified (just as in Method Two): my-ssid, which you will replace with your network's name, and my-psk, which will be your network's password.

We now need to figure out the Wi-Fi dongle's interface name. To do this, we will first examine which interfaces are present using the following command:

$ ifconfig -a

This command outputs the currently active interfaces, which may include eth0, lo, and usb0.

Reboot your board.

Plug in your dongle and run the same command again:

$ ifconfig -a

The output should now show the new device's interface name, which could be ra0, wlan0, or so on.

Open the file in the directory specified in the following path:

$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

At the top of the file, paste the following code, replacing interfacename with the name that appeared in Step 6:

allow-hotplug ra0
iface interfacename inet manual
  wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Close the file by pressing Ctrl + x; when prompted, type y for yes, then press the return (Enter) key.

Assuming your dongle is still plugged in, run a command that brings up the interface:

$ ifup interfacename

Power down the BBB by running this:

$ sudo poweroff

Make sure your Wi-Fi dongle is plugged into a powered USB hub with the hub's USB cable inserted into the BBB's USB port.

Restart the board; this time, plug into the DC power supply.

You will now get a solid Wi-Fi connection. Test it via the command shell using the following command:

$ ping www.google.com

If all went well, you should see a steady screen output from the ping.

Plug an Ethernet cable connected to your router into the BBB's Ethernet port.

Boot up and log in to your BBB connected to a monitor.

Open a terminal window and log in as root with the following command:

$sudo -i
#

Install the package network manager. Before installing a new package, always begin by updating your repositories as follows:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install network-manager

Now, open up the new package with this command:

# nmtui

A rudimentary interface should open up in the terminal window, similar to the following image:

Select Activate a connection.

In the next window, select your network, and you will be prompted for the password.

Quit the network manager screen after putting in your password. Then, check to verify that your dongle now has an IP address in the wlanX interface with this command:

# ifconfig -a

Now, power down, remove the Ethernet cable, and reboot using this command:

# reboot

Run the magical ping command to check how we did:

$ ping www.google.com

Voila! Your BBB should now be connected wirelessly.