Pi Zero W - Wifi Jessie Lite v Pixel

[lastbyname]

Posted in case this helps others:

Like many others, I've had problems trying to get wifi to work on Jessie Lite released 2017-03-02.

Using a clean image of Jessie Lite, I created the standard wpa_supplicant.conf entries for my wifi router (and which are exactly the same as Jessie Lite on a Pi 3), and unchanged /etc/network/interfaces (again, exactly the same as Jessie Lite on a Pi 3). Wifi would not connect, and I was getting "wpa_supplicant daemon failed to start" errors.

Instead, I've downloaded the full Jessie Pixel desktop version, against release date 2017-03-02. Using the desktop gui, I can connect to my wifi router. Looking at the resulting wpa_supplicant and interfaces config files, they are *exactly* the same as those I manually created to try and drive Jessie Lite.

My conclusion is that there is a software discrepancy between the network software in Jessie Lite versus full Pixel.

[ShiftPlusOne]

What's the content of wpa_supplicant.conf and what happens when you run wpa_supplicant manually?

[BMS Doug]

Posted in case this helps others:

Like many others, I've had problems trying to get wifi to work on Jessie Lite released 2017-03-02.

Using a clean image of Jessie Lite, I created the standard wpa_supplicant.conf entries for my wifi router (and which are exactly the same as Jessie Lite on a Pi 3), and unchanged /etc/network/interfaces (again, exactly the same as Jessie Lite on a Pi 3). Wifi would not connect, and I was getting "wpa_supplicant daemon failed to start" errors.

Instead, I've downloaded the full Jessie Pixel desktop version, against release date 2017-03-02. Using the desktop gui, I can connect to my wifi router. Looking at the resulting wpa_supplicant and interfaces config files, they are *exactly* the same as those I manually created to try and drive Jessie Lite.

My conclusion is that there is a software discrepancy between the network software in Jessie Lite versus full Pixel.

I also had an issue getting Jessie-lite to run the wifi, I found that by creating the SD card in pi-bakery with wifi details pre-configured it worked every time.