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I have (more precisely, my employer has) a machine running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which comes with wpa_supplicant version 2.1. There are improvements in wpa_supplicant 2.5 which I believe may help with some wifi issues this machine is suffering.

According to dpkg -S, wpa_supplicant is in the wpasupplicant package, but sudo apt-get upgrade wpasupplicant tells me I already have the latest version available.

Is there a PPA in some standard place that would let me bring wpa_supplicant up to version 2.5? Or is it better to build from source? Or is there something else I should be doing?

(The less drastic and invasive the upgrade procedure, the better for us: this machine is actually on someone else's premises and we can connect to it only via wifi. So it would be sad if trying to upgrade wpa_supplicant had the effect of breaking its wifi connection. A brief interruption of connectivity is fine, though.)

dlin
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Gareth McCaughan
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  • Right now even [xenial is using 2.4](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/xenial/amd64/wpasupplicant). So you won't be able to find it through any standard ubuntu repositories, but you may find it elsewhere. Worst case scenario you can compile it from source. [this link](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/basicnet/wpa_supplicant.html) may give you some help on that route – Mitch Feb 03 '16 at 17:30
  • Step 0, Before you search for the source for wpa_supplicant, build it, and install it hoping it won't break WiFi and MIGHT fix your problem, is to diagnose your WiFi problem. `zgrep wlan /var/log/kern.log*` on both ends will give you something to start with. Applying a random solution before knowing what the problem is NEVER ends well. – waltinator Feb 03 '16 at 18:01
  • Good advice, waltinator. As it happens, I am not applying a random solution before knowing what the problem is; I have done some diagnostic work, found a specific problem and good reason to think it responsible for many of the issues the machine is suffering, and established that there is a fix for that problem in 2.5 but not in earlier versions. I didn't go into those details in the question because I didn't consider them relevant. – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 11:11
  • (If you're curious, see http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034640.html for the problem, http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034641.html for the info that 2.5 has a fix, and http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034646.html for the principal developer of wpa_supplicant saying it should be safe to upgrade.) – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 11:14
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    For what it's worth, what I've actually done so far is: grab a 2.5 tarball, adjust its config file to match what Ubuntu 14.04 expects, build, and then upgrade in place by moving the wpa_supplicant executable out of the way, copying the new one into its location, and then killing the wpa_supplicant process. (It gets restarted automatically and it's the new one that runs.) No bad consequences are apparent, but of course there might be trouble lurking to bite us later... – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 16:59
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    @GarethMcCaughan did it solve you problem? I'm having the same issue, feel free to answer here https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/385364/3285 – Evan Carroll Aug 11 '17 at 03:32
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    It seemed to work, yes. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '17 at 11:12

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