My setup consists of a raspberry pi5 running latest Bookworm with in-built wifi as wlan0. I then added a Realtek usb-wifi dongle which appears as wlan1. I then followed these steps to setup wlan1 as the hotspot.

sudo nmcli d wifi hotspot ifname wlan1 ssid A0123 password x1234567

Device ‘wlan1’ successfully activated with ‘6614cb3b-a24f-4da6-bd1e-5766a9e6c750’.
Hint: “nmcli dev wifi show-password” shows the Wi-Fi name and password.

sudo nmcli conn mod Hotspot autoconnect yes

sudo nmcli conn up Hotspot

Connection successfully activated (D-Bus active path: /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/ActiveConnection/10)

ifconfig wlan1

wlan1: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 10.42.0.1  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 10.42.0.255
        inet6 fe80::a247:d7ff:fe70:7492  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether a0:47:d7:70:74:92  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 1601  bytes 275194 (268.7 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 2  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 2006  bytes 516471 (504.3 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

From my macbook I can see A0123 as an available network. However on attempting to connect to it, I keep getting the dialog box for entering the password. Perhaps I am missing something obvious?

I have tested the wifi dongle to act as a standard wifi interface, which works perfectly, it can connect to home wifi router, get its DHCP address and I can ssh into the rpi at the dongle’s address. I have also tried setting the hotspot without the password and it fails with unable to join the network message.