Use WICD to set-up wifi on a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie Lite

Daniel Bull, who created the excellent CamJam EduKit 3 3D printed chassis, wanted to set-up wifi on his Pi Zero. He downloaded Raspbian Jessie Lite (the cut-down version of Raspbian now offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation) but found that WICD, his usual method of setting up wifi in a command-line environment, didn’t work. After 3 hours of messing around, he discovered that it conflicted with dhcpcd5. Removing this made WICD work again. He has posted about it on G+ but here are the instructions anyway:

To install WICD:

sudo apt-get install wicd-curses

To remove dhcpcd5:

sudo apt-get remove dhcpcd5

Once you’ve done those two commands, WICD will be up and running again.

5 comments for “Use WICD to set-up wifi on a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie Lite

  1. Just tried this, but it seems like this didn’t quite work. Did you have to reboot it first? I noticed that even the lan no longer seems to work (at least on a RPi2)

    • Not tried it myself, but I’d imagine it WOULD need a reboot, yes. Try it again. If it doesn’t work, come back to me and I’ll have a word with Daniel who came up with it.

  2. Great tip ! It worked for me (on Jessie) and finally I could connect to the wifi. Thanks a lot.

  3. Thank you very much,
    In fact with Raspbian Lite I had this same problem, (wicd was doing all steps but finally when getting IP, saying “Not connected”!)
    Reboot needed effectively !

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