I'm writing a small little app that I want to submit to the Ubuntu App Review board, and one thing I'd like to do is for it to show the names of the detected Wireless SSIDs in a combo box. It's a PyGI app.
Has anyone got any pointers on how I can get those SSIDs from the system, preferably through a Python API? From dbus? From NetworkManager?
You can do this easily from NetworkManager's pygi bindings:
from gi.repository import NetworkManager, NMClient
nmc = NMClient.Client.new()
devs = nmc.get_devices()
for dev in devs:
if dev.get_device_type() == NetworkManager.DeviceType.WIFI:
for ap in dev.get_access_points():
print ap.get_ssid()
Or from DBus directly, see http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/examples/python/show-bssids.py
If you're inclined to just quickly script this in shell; an easy way to ask NetworkManager for this is to use:
nmcli dev wifi list
Or use iwlist scan, or better: iw dev wlan0 scan (or ... scan dump), after installing the iw 
package.
One option is to run iwlist scan on the command line, but it has to be run as root
