wavemon is a wireless device monitoring application that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware. It should work (though with varying features) with all devices supported by the Linux kernel.

See the man page for an in-depth description of operation and configuration.

Apart from debian/ubuntu packages (apt-cache search wavemon) and slackbuild scripts for wavemon, this repository contains the full source code.

Minimally the following are required:

• the pkg-config package,
• netlink libnl-cli-3-dev at least version 3.2 (pulls in libnl-3-dev, libnl-genl-3-dev),
• ncurses development files (libncursesw6, libtinfo6, libncurses-dev).

On Debian/Ubuntu, this can be done using

apt-get -y install pkg-config libncursesw6 libtinfo6 libncurses-dev libnl-cli-3-dev

Please note the "w" in libncursesw6, which stands for the wide-character variant of ncurses. This is required for proper rendering on UTF-8 terminals.

wavemon uses autoconf, so that in most cases you can simply run

./configure && make && sudo make install

to build and install the package. Type make uninstall if not happy.

Pass additional CFLAGS to configure, like this:

CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe" ./configure

Passing CFLAGS to make is not encouraged, since that will replace the settings found by configure.

To grant users access to restricted networking operations (scanning), use

sudo make install-suid-root

If you have changed some of the autoconf files or use a git version, run

./config/bootstrap

(This requires a recent installation of autotools.)