With my new phone, I needed to migrate all the WiFi settings. For some reason, it seems to be hard to export WiFi configuration from Android and import it in another. The same holds true for GNOME, I guess.

The only way of getting WiFi configuration into your Android phone (when not being able to write the wpa_supplicant file) seems to be barcodes! When using the barcode reader application, you can scan a code in a certain format and the application would then create a wifi configuration for you.

I quickly cooked up something that allows me to “export” my laptop’s NetworkManager WiFis via a QR code. You can run create_barcode_from_wifi.py and it creates a barcode of your currently active configuration, if any. You will also see a list of known configurations which you can then select via the index. The excellent examples in the NetworkManager’s git repository helped me to get my things done quickly. There’s really good stuff in there.

I found out that I needed to explicitely render the QR code black on white, otherwise the scanning app wouldn’t work nicely. Also, I needed to make the terminal’s font smaller or go into fullscreen with F11 in order for the barcode to be printed fully on my screen. If you have a smaller screen than, say, 1360×768, I guess you will have a problem using that. In that case, you can simply let PyQRCode render a PNG, EPS, or SVG. Funnily enough, I found it extremely hard to print either of those formats on an A4 sheet. The generated EPS looks empty:

Printing that anyway through Evince makes either CUPS or my printer die. Converting with ImageMagick, using convert /tmp/barcode.eps -resize 1240x1753 -extent 1240x1753 -gravity center -units PixelsPerInch -density 150x150 /tmp/barcode.eps.pdf

makes everything very blurry.

Using the PNG version with Eye of GNOME does not allow to scale the image up to my desired size, although I do want to print the code as big as possible on my A4 sheet:

Now you could argue that, well, just render your PNG bigger. But I can’t. It seems to be a limitation of the PyQRCode library. But there is the SVG, right? Turns out, that eog still doesn’t allow me to print the image any bigger. Needless to say that I didn’t have inkscape installed to make it work… So I went ahead and used LaTeX instead…

Anyway, you can get the code on github and gitlab. I guess it might make sense to push it down to NetworkManager, but as I am more productive in writing Python, I went ahead with it without thinking much about proper integration.

After being able to produce Android compatible WiFi QR codes, I also wanted to be able to scan those with my GNOME Laptop to not having to enter passwords manually. The ingredients for a solution to this problem is parsing the string encoded as a barcode and creating a connection via the excellent NetworkManager API. Creating the connection is comparatively easy, given that an example already exists. Parsing the string, however, is a bit more complex than I initially thought. The grammar of that WiFi encoding language is a bit insane in the sense that it allows multiple encodings for the same thing and that it is not clear to encode (or decode) certain networks. For example, imagine your password is 12345678 . The encoding format now wants to know whether that is ASCII characters or the hex encoded passphrase (i.e. the hex encoded bytes 0x12,0x34,0x56,0x78 ). In the former case, the encoded passphrase must be quoted with double quotes, e.g. P:"12345678"; . Fair enough. Now, let’s imagine the password is "12345678" (yes, with the quotes). Then you need to hex encode that ASCII string to P:22313233343536373822 . But, as it turns out, that’s not what people have done, so I have seen quite a few weird QR codes for Wifis out there

Long story short, the scan_wifi_code.py program should also scan your barcode and create a new WiFi connection for you.

Do you have any other ideas how to migrate wifi settings from one device to another?