Daily Archive for October 12th, 2006

wpa wireless on a IBM Thinkpad T43p (running Debian Etch)

So after writing about setting up the wireless on my desktop, I now have got it working on my laptop. All it needed was the wpasupplicant package and the ipw2200 network driver (and of course the ieee80211 network stack), though I installed all those ages ago, so cannot remember what was involved, but I think they are in a standard kernel.

It wasn’t all that hard to get encryption working, though it does appear that my patch to wpa_supplicant does change the way it was intended to work. I am not sure if it is a general wpa_supplicant change, or a Debian specific change, but to launch wpa_supplicant I am supposed to use the “wext” driver, instead of the ipw one which relates to my network card.

This was in the Debian readme for wpa_supplicant, but I did spend a while trying to use the ipw driver in wpa_supplicant before finding it. For completeness, I have 2 of my config files below (the only ones needed in fact)

/etc/network/interfaces

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wireless-essid ant-wifi
wpa-driver wext
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf


ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
network={
ssid="ant-wifi"
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk="****"
priority=2
}

The next stage will be trying to get the WPA-EAP/LEAP working at work. That WILL be more challenging

Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed

Slashdot pointed my to an article which summarises the long problem between Debian and Mozilla.  Mozilla vs Debian Analyzed covers some of the basics behind the problem which is hard to believe.

The basic premise of the argument, which may stop Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird shipping in Debian, is that the logo’s for the software are trademarked, and hence are not free for anyone to use. Debian has a strict policy on what is included in a release, and non-free software just doesn’t make it. So Debian want to ship Firefox without the logo’s, but you can only call it Firefox if you use the logo’s. There are also problems with code changes to the software, as Debian often fixes problems, or changes the code slightly to make it fit into Debian better.

Essentially the Mozilla foundation don’t want to let Debian use the name Firefox without the logo’s and without checking the code changes (and even build options) first. At this rate, as Etch is supposed to ship around the end of the year, or early next year, Firefox will only appear in Debian under the name IceWeasel!

This should never have got this far. There must be a better way of working the problem out… All I can say is that if this continues, Firefox could have competition from IceWeasel, as the Debian packagers are really good at patching the Mozilla codebase.