Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo + wifi

["Matt Connell (Gmail)" <matthewdconnell@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 2021-03-21 at 21:25 -0400, Philip Webb wrote:
> if I use the Wifi services, is whether I would need to add hardware to my machine

It depends on if your motherboard has an integrated Wifi chip or not.

If it does not have an external connector for an antenna, it probably
doesn't have the hardware.

However, USB wifi adapters are quite affordable and sufficient for your
use case, in my opinion.

> whether I would need to add any packages to my Gentoo system.

Yes, you will.  You'll need to find out what chipset is used by the
adapter you want to add (or already have). Once you have that, you can
enable the appropriate kernel drivers and rebuild, and then you'll need
to install net-wireless/wpa_supplicant to make the actual connection.

wpa_supplicant can be cumbersome to set up by hand, but the Arch wiki
has a very comprehensive page[1] on how to configure it. 
Alternatively, there are GUI tools for managing the configuration (the
aptly named wpa_gui is usually enough; to get this, you need to enable
the qt5 use flag for wpa_supplicant), but if you're connecting to one
network, and never changing the configuration, that might be overkill.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wpa_supplicant