Marcin Juszkiewicz - wpa

Goodbye handhelds.org

2007-06-01T17:46:00+02:00

I read thread about opie trademark on opie ML, read posts about GPE situation months ago and now and decided that handhelds.org is not my community.

OPIE was my favorite environment since I bought Zaurus SL-5500 over 3 years ago. I was one of persons which added OPIE recipes into OpenEmbedded and spent lot of time to get it working properly. When I got Zaurus C760 I concentrated on fixing OPIE for working better with hires displays (most of them are landed in 1.2.2 release).

After those three years (2 as official developer with r/w access to CVS) I decided that it is time to say goodbye. None of my devices run OPIE and no plans that they will ever run it — time pass and show that most of software for it is not maintained and I lost faith in new OPIE/Qtopia 2.x applications over year ago. It does not even allow to connect my PDAs to my home network…

So goodbye and thanks — it was good time.

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 ;)

Neo1973 and WiFi

2007-03-23T21:53:00+01:00

FIC Neo1973 phone is more or less ready for developers. GTA01Bv4 will be shipped soon but it will not have WiFi. The reason is simple — creators did not found chip which will:

be small enough
not eat lot of power
have open sourced driver (I wrote more on drivers before)

If everything will go OK then during Summer there will be hardware update which will add WiFi (they are meeting with Taiwan companies to discuss availability of good chipsets) and maybe faster CPU or more flash…

I have to admit that I did not understand why people want WiFi in phone so much… But this is because I mostly use wireless when I am at home so I can use my desktop machine. But when I had to spent two hours on Munich airport during way to FOSDEM (Thx goes to Secunet company which sponsored my plane tickets) I had an option to use WiFi (not free iirc) so with proper hardware… RSS, Emails..

But time will show what will be in GTA01Bv5 (if it will exist at all). Now we have to get used to current hardware and write software for it.

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 ;(

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.

Handling PCMCIA/CF cards in Linux

2006-06-14T07:56:00+02:00

I do not like a way how PCMCIA/CF cards are handled under Linux. For kernels < 2.6.13-rc1 the only choice is pcmcia-cs package with lot of files in /etc/pcmcia/ which are just cardctl ident output edited a bit with added driver name:

root@c7x0:~# cardctl ident
Socket 0:
  product info: "Pretec", "CompactWLAN Card 802.11b", "2.5"
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
  function: 6 (network)
root@c7x0:~# tail -n4 /etc/pcmcia/hostap_cs.conf
card "Pretec WLAN"
  version "Pretec", "CompactWLAN Card 802.11b", "2.5"
  manfid 0x0156, 0x0002
  bind "hostap_cs"
root@c7x0:~#

With newer kernels we have two options:

stick with pcmcia-cs and it’s configs
use new pcmciautils and udev rules

Pcmciautils way is nice — no extra daemon running, cards are handled as hotpluggable — everything looks nice and clear… But there is something other — list of devices handled by driver is in driver itself — so if you get card which is not there then you have to provide patch for it (like I already did for some cards) or try module aliases.

But both methods has one nasty thing — no way to tell ‘this card HAS to use THIS driver NOT that’ ;( This situation is common for Prism2 based WiFi cards which can be used with orinoco_cs driver (will appear as eth0) or with hostap_cs driver (appear as wlan0). For example my Pretec card (ident shown above) is handled by both drivers but only HostAP give me possibility to connect to my home network which use WPA-PSK for security (Orinoco does not support WPA at all). And all because some manufacturers was to lazy to change manfid/prodid of card from the one which reference card had…

Prism firmware features

2005-10-27T17:17:00+02:00

WiFi cards which use Prism chipset can have miscelanous versions of firmware. Hopefully they can be flashed to newer version.

But which version to choose? I tried to collect some infos about firmwares and here are results:

1.3.1- Added ability to perform non-destructive AP scanning (i.e., maintain current association state)
1.4.9 — Earlier version (1.4.2?) has some problems with PCI-based cards. The symptom is corrupted packets. If you have PCI cards, upgrade to this one.
1.5.6 — This version and later ones enable hostap driver to use standard 4-address packet format for WDS packets.
1.6.3 — Supports hiding ESSID.
1.7.0 — Supports WPA encryption.
1.8.4 — Latest flashable version.