Marcin Juszkiewicz - wlan-ng

WPA in Debian and Poky

2007-04-25T11:25:00+02:00

During last week I switched my home WiFi from insecure WEP to WPA2.

Why not used WPA before? My x86 test machine was ProGear which use Orinoco PCMCIA card (no WPA support) and I also used Tosa with that crap called wlan-ng (also no WPA support). Now I have USB Ethernet card and PCMCIA->CF adapter so both can be connected via wire or with CF WiFi card (Prism2 with 1.8.4 firmware so WPA out-of-box).

But since I use Dell D400 as x86 test machine ProGear is not powered — I will probably put it on shelf to get some desk space free (there is no such thing as big enough desk — just ones that are not cluttered yet).

But how to get WPA working in Debian, Poky, Ångström, OpenZaurus or other distros? You basically need few things:

WPA-Supplicant
card with good driver (so no Orinoco or wlan-ng crap)
proper configuration
network with WPA

First I configured “maluch” (D400). Installed wpasupplicant package and discovered that it is not supported out-of-box. README propose two methods:

Use only one network and configure network in /etc/network/interfaces
Roaming networks with extra scripts

I decided to follow 3rd way where you need to edit /etc/network/interfaces just to tell wpa-supplicant which config it has to use and which driver:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/config

This way wpa-supplicant is started automatically with /etc/wpa_supplicant/config file as configuration. This file also contain all networks which you want to connect. It can be edited by hand or using external tools — wpa_cli or wpa_gui (QT3/QT4). Have to check does it works ok with other networks then my home one but it should work.

Then same configuration on Zaurus C760 running Poky — Prism2 card in CompactFlash slot. Connecting to network works out-of-box now. On Nokia 770 all I need to to was entering WPA-PSK key.

The worst part was MS Windows laptop — I had to remove all networks from list of preferred ones, reboot and then enter WPA-PSK key to get it working.

Now it should be harder to connect to my network ;)

Drivers in Linux land

2007-02-20T00:30:00+01:00

Today I read post on about state of drivers for graphic cards. There are closed source propertiary drivers which works and give 3D acceleration and there are free drivers which cover some cards and provide kind of 3D acceleration for subset of them. The result is that user have to choose:

closed, propertiary driver which can contain security problems but gives working 2D, 3D
free driver which works in 2D but rather not in 3D

Similar problem exists with WiFi support. CompactFlash cards are now hard to get because good, working ones (Prism2/3 based for example) are not RoHS friendly so no one want to manufacture or sell them. Instead there are new cards which base on new chipsets with no drivers or pay us to get source which you can not share licensed ones.

USB dongles are in better situation as there exists few good supported chipsets:

Zydas (mainline kernel and also external one)
Ralink (external free one and also vendor provided one)
Prism2 (working, shitty one)

For a start let we forget that Prism2 exists in USB version (it does not support WPA, code is very low quality, will never merge into mainline kernel). Zydas and Ralink supports also 802.11g and are available from many vendors, have working drivers, firmware is available. As usual user has to triple check does this is version with blue sticker and not with red one because red ones use other chipset which is not supported.

There are also dongles with Marvell 8388 or 8338 chipset — first ones are supported by libertas driver done for OLPC, second one are not supported yet. BTW — this driver will also support 8385 chipset used in some CompactFlash cards.

And USB versions has other problem… they require +5V which is not present in many embedded devices. 3.3V, 2.5V, 2.0V and even 1.8V or less are common values for that kind of hardware. I know companies which solved it by rebuilding existing USB devices to work with 3.3V (many WiFi dongles use that voltage and have proper regulator on board to change +5V into +3.3V) — this way they can lower price and complication of device by not using extra regulators. This also improves power life. But you have to remember which dongles are changed to not plug them into PC — if you forgot then they get burnt after insert.

When few years ago I was buying my first PC I selected all components to be 100% sure that all will works under Linux. Those years passed but you still need to be careful when you buy new hardware ;(

Zaurus line officially ended

2007-01-12T20:43:00+01:00

Yesterday I got official information that Sharp ended Zaurus line — last production will be in February 2007 and then nothing — no new models, no building of older models. Many people wrote that this is bad thing, that they will miss new toys with Zaurus name…

I am not one of them. Since SL-C3000 (called “spitz”) model I had a feeling that Sharp is not able to create new handheld device for mass market. There was few new things in it but basically it was old clamshell line on steroids. Palmtop built to be used as English<>Japanese dictionary rather then as PDA. Then they released SL-C1000 (“akita)” which was spitz without hard drive (in form of 4GB CompactFlash microdrive) but with 128MB of Flash memory like it was in end of previous clamshell line. Both models were selling quite good and one day Sharp merged Akita and 4GB microdrive and thats how SL-C3100 (“borzoi”) was created. Again nothing new… Some months ago they got out of stock of 4GB cards so SL-C3200 (“terrier”) was created — with 6GB microdrive.

But those models were much worse then other palmtops on market… Windows Mobile devices got Bluetooth as standard, more and more models got WiFi inside (now even 802.11g instead of old 802.11b standard). Sharp did not even tried to compete with them. There were rumours that there was a plan to release SL-C3500 which would get WiFi inside but knowing Sharp it would be some shitty wlan-ng USB stick with drivers lacking WPA and any good support.

Add to it their lack of any support to users… Can you imagine that 2006 models were sold with few years old software created for first Zaurus models? They only did some small modifications to get some of new features supported. Someone told one day:

Sharp should concentrate on building Zaurus models. But they should not touch software — OpenZaurus or pdaX teams do it in much better way.

So I think that it is good that they finally ended Zaurus line — it was visible that they do not have idea which way to go and how to support users of own toys.

BTW: some people asked what will OpenZaurus team do now — we are working on 3.5.5 release for all existing models (except SL-A300 as usual). After release most of us will probably concentrate on fixing bugs, adding software and will move to Ångström distribution as this is future of embedded distros.

Tosa and 2.6 kernel

2006-07-10T23:37:00+02:00

Few days ago I flashed 2.6.17 on tosa (with unofficial OpenZaurus 3.5.4.1 OPIE image) and I have to say that it was good choice. After fixing keymap (pushed into OpenEmbedded) and adding one script into apm (not yet pushed) I have machine which suspend/resume very fast, has working WiFi after each resume and behave better then it was with 2.4 (see my previous post).

But it is not yet ready for end users:

sometimes battery info report 0% — suspend/resume help
USB Host module lack Power Managment — need to be removed/inserted on suspend/resume
touchscreen is weird — horizontal lines got ‘pings’

Tomorrow I will get USB keyboard from friend so will test how it is — usage of external (wired) keyboard with PDA…

Tosa USB experiences

2006-07-04T16:45:00+02:00

Yesterday I got USB Host cable from Trisoft (donated like I wrote before) so I decided to check how it works.

First try was my TDK Bluetooth dongle which I got year ago. Installed kernel-module-hci-usb, connected dongle and it was not working. So I rebooted and after reboot and manual module loading I got hci0 shown in hciconfig output. But I was unable to do any scanning for devices.

Then I disconnected BT and connected my few years old 64M pendrive. Tosa did not even notice that change… so I did another reboot. After that I got /dev/sda1 mountable and working.

In next weeks (plan to have 2 week vacations) I plan to test some more USB equipment — plan to buy powered hub, already have multiport card reader, will borrow USB keyboard etc. And most important thing — test 2.6 kernel on tosa.

First days using Tosa/2.4

2006-06-30T12:31:00+02:00

During last days I moved from my C760 to Tosa. It is heavy, big and has awesome screen — I can use it even with lowest brightness setting (one step from “no backlight”). Stylus is made from plastic but is longer then styli from other Zaurus models. Internal WiFi is able to do WPA on firmware level but driver do not support it ;(

First day was SharpROM day because I forgot to take CF card from home to flash OpenZaurus. SharpROM looks quite OK but some things was weird. For example handling of QVGA applications — screen was switched into 240x320 mode with ‘please wait’ message on start and exit… This slowdown plus no possibility to switch off that switching force user to rather skip using such apps. WiFi settings has profiles support which is nice but due to fact that internal wireless use wlan-ng drivers I could not get WPA so was not able to connect to my home AP.

Same day evening I flashed OpenZaurus 3.5.4 (OPIE flavour) into device. System boots and works but I needed to install some upgrades to get fixed keyboard mapping etc. Reconfigured AP to get connection, configured WiFi in tosa and ipkg update;ipkg upgrade was working. Lot of stuff upgraded and after reboot I got working keyboard but lost HostAP configuration files (will hunt this bug and add proper fixes into OpenZaurus upgrades feed). Lack of Control key make it not so usable with OPIE terminals so I use OPIE-IRC on it instead of logging into my irssi-over-screen session. And there are two keys which functionality is something which I must find out (one above Cancel and Backlight/Rotate one).

Machine works quite nice but after using 2.6 kernel on PDA for over one year I feel that 2.4-crapix is slow… Resuming from suspend need time to get machine responding, enabling WiFi means machine not responding for a while too… I hope that 2.6 will get into usable state soon.