Connect to WPA wifi on fresh Debian install

Question

I have a laptop with a wifi card that needs proprietary drivers (and no ethernet). The Debian 10 installer (debian-10.0.0-amd64-xfce-CD-1.iso) failed to automatically detect the driver (*.ucode file) that I had on a USB, so I continued the installation without internet. I logged in and copied the ucode to /lib/firmware and now my wifi card seems to be working ("ip a" will list my wifi card)

I'm trying to connect to wifi with WPA security. The problem is that it appears I do not have wpa_supplicant installed (nor iwconfig, nmcli, connman or etc). Every guide or QA I've found (eg this) assumes wpa_supplicant/wpa_passphrase/etc is already installed.

So, how do you connect to WPA wifi in this situation?

Answer 1

You can connect your phone to your computer with an USB cable and share your mobile internet with USB tethering. After that you can install wpa_supplicant and other tools to connect wifi

The settings menu can different from device to device but it generally goes like this

1. Turn on your cellular data or connect to a wifi on your phone
2. Connect your phone to your pc with an USB cable
3. Go to settings in your phone
4. Find the hotspot and tethering settings
5. Activate USB tethering

Now you should be able to access the internet through your phone. Now all you gotta do is install wpa_supplicant on your pc with:

sudo apt install wpa_supplicant