Continuing the discussion from WiFi setup and troubleshooting:
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 2B, TP-Link Wifi Dongle
Issue:
Raspi-config was "unable to communicate with WPA_supplicant" on setup for both vanilla Rasbian Buster and Octopi (both most recent as of 2020/03/08). I encountered this same issue on Rasbian Stretch in the past as well, and the solution was the same.
Solution
Edit WPA_Supplicant and network/interfaces like so.
sudo nano etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
country=CA
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
ssid="**SSID**"
psk="**PASS**"
}
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet manual
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
And then: sudo systemctl enable wpa_supplicant.service
Thats it, reboot and rip it
More about this issue:
I knew something was amiss when I ran sudo iwlist wlan0 scan and was able to see all of the networks. The issues with WPA_Supplicant and interfaces files were cryptic and I had to stitch together lots of hints from different forums to solve this.