Wireless Network Connection via CLI

For the past few years, I have been using my trusty D-Link DWA-125 wireless dongle on my PC to connect to a wireless network. I have written about how to connect to WiFi via the command line but that was for unsecured networks. Recently, I've been fumbling around with Debian and did a minimal netinstall (to build it up with a GUI desktop) -- sort of a "from scratch" installation, like how Arch Linux installation is done. Since netinstall without a desktop environment drops you off at the CLI on first boot, I needed to find a way to connect to a WiFi network without the use of GUI network managers.

Getting the DWA-125 Wireless Dongle to Work in CentOS 5.8

I use an old IBM Thinkpad X32 which doesn't come with a built-in wireless networking card. Fortunately, I still have my D-Link DWA-125 wireless USB adapter lying around. I used this on a previous computer before and it didn't let me down. I was hoping that this time around, it wouldn't let me down either; and I can say that it didn't as I am typing this post using the successful setup of a wireless connection. This time around, I am using CentOS 5.8 as my operating system. Here's how I got it working.