It turns out that the problem is with dhcp. It does not want to give this interface an IP address. When I configured the interface by hand, via ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.100 broadcast 192.168.1.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 up It worked find. However dhcp thinks it has to be done this way. That's apparently where the error message "Startup is manual" is coming from. So I proceeded to tear ifup appart and see what makes it tick. While screwing around with that, I found a utility called ifup-dhcp. Hey, nothing else works, so why not? It worked. Man ifup-dhcp does nothing. I have no idea what it is, but all I know is that when I did a ifup-dhcp wlan0 -o debug,auto dhcp assigned an address to wlan0 . Go figure, thanks everyone Jim.