Tired of waiting for the One Laptop Per Child laptop?
How about one of these cuties from RM / Asus? It’ll be £169, uses flash memory not a hard drive, has WiFi and runs Linux. Ticks all the boxes for me…
Archive for the 'WiFi' Category
I think I might now know why there are so many unsecured wireless computer networks around.
I could never understand this, it seems so stupid to leave your network wide open. Security is easy enough to set up with MacOS X, a snip with a Nintendo DS - I even managed it using command line tools on a cut-down version of Linux.
Then I tried to get 3 different Windows XP laptops to talk to my wireless network; I entered my SpeedTouch 570 router’s SSID, I carefully added the WEP key, I used ipconfig /all at the Windows command line to get the MAC address of each wireless card so I could add them to the router’s permitted list of MAC addresses. Nothing. Each time the only way I could get the Windows XP machines to see my network was to disable WEP entirely - hence why I now see why many people might think ’soddit, I’ll turn the security measures off’.
In the meantime, I did discover that partially dropping security might help - by default my router only allows computers with the correct SSID to connect; turning off that basic security measure seems to have helped. But why should Windows XP force me to drop my security? Even a toy like a Nintendo DS can manage it.
CAUTION: this is a geeky Linuxy post that’s really just here because I’ll forget how I did this in about a week and I might want to do this again some time…
Ages ago I put Xubuntu - a cut-down version of Linux - on an ancient Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop. The other day I found an old Cisco Aironet 350 wireless PCMCIA card lying around and it occurred to me that if I could get it working then this old laptop could be a bit more useful - if only for web-browsing in the tree house without worrying about the kids damaging my PowerBook.
The XFCE graphical environment I installed has very few bells and whistles - there’s certainly no GUI to tweak WiFi settings, so I plugged the Cisco card in the top PCMCIA slot and went to the command line and tried iwconfig to see what was wirelessly going on inside, if anything; it looked a bit like this, suggesting some WiFi action was possible on the eth1 interface:
interface:myname@tecra8000:~$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
irda0 no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:” ”
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.417 GHz Access Point: 00:00:00:76:FC:04
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Sensitivity=0/65535
Retry limit:16 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=90/100 Signal level=-50 dBm Noise level=-98 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:14 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:4253 Missed beacon:0
So then I edited the interfaces file like this:
sudo pico /etc/network/interfaces
to make the primary network interfaces section read like this, including the name of my wireless router and its WEP key:
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-key abcdef123456
wireless-essid MyRouterSSID
And then I restarted networking like this:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Then to get the machine to start the graphical environment as soon as I log in at the command line, I added these lines to /home/myname/.bash_profile:
if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" -o "$(tty)" = "/dev/vc/1" ] ; then
startx
fi
Brilliant!
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