Network wizard Beta version for testers

Under development: PCMCIA, wireless, etc.
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barriew
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#16 Post by barriew »

Rarsa,

Tried to test without success. I am using WPA-PSK/TKIP, and I believe the equipment and module do support this encryption mode.
A question though - my router requires an ASCII key. You say you convert an ASCII key to HEX, but should I just enter the ASCII characters into Wizard, or do I need to indicate they are ASCII?

Barrie

NB I dont really need WPA - just testing for you.

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rarsa
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#17 Post by rarsa »

I aplologize for the big letters, I was a little bit tired yesterday.
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#18 Post by rarsa »

barriew wrote:You say you convert an ASCII key to HEX, but should I just enter the ASCII characters into Wizard, or do I need to indicate they are ASCII?
Based on my reading and my testing here is the scoop:

If you set up an ASCII Key on the router, you can configure your addapter with either that ASCII key or with a properly generated HEX key.

The HEX key gets generated from the SSID and the ASCII key.

I tested this so it should not be a problem.

I forgot to ask people to execute the script from the command line so they can report on what they see in the screen.

Tonight I will upload a new version that fixes something that I broke in the current version (Scanning networks and Deleting profiles) and I will include more debugging code.

I appreciate your help. From my point of view, testing is as valuable or more than the actual development.

Thank you,
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PaulBx1
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#19 Post by PaulBx1 »

I moved my non-WPA testing questions about the wizard here.

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rarsa
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#20 Post by rarsa »

During my testing I found two broken things:

- Scanning is not working.
- Deleting an existing Profile is not working.

I've fixed both issues and will upload the update later today.
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PaulBx1
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#21 Post by PaulBx1 »

I noticed scanning gave pretty strange results.

However, I want to report, the Wizard got me connected! Without having to use ndiswrapper either, a first for me. Great job, Rarsa, this was way easier than the first time I did it!

I am using it right now posting this message. :D

A couple of minor points.

In the WPA screen, there is a button below that says "advanced". When you push it you get more things to enter. However the button down below still says "advanced". Isn't the "standard" way of doing it to rename that button "basic", to get back to the basic screen?

The basic screen did the job for me by the way. In the advanced screen, you can enter "channel" or "frequency" IIRC. Of course those two are connected, I wonder if you have connected them in the code? Also, it would be nice to have a little help screen saying what all those parameters are, although that might be a future sort of thing.

In the basic screen, it asked for "Name". At first I was confused because I knew the basic supplicant parameters were only essid and key, but then it dawned on me the name you were asking for was the profile name, which is not something that goes inside the conf file, right? Maybe you should separate that a bit from the rest of the parameters, or call it "Profile Name", or both...

I had a bit of problem with the driver selection too. Seemed strange to use a pci driver for a pcmcia card. I was expecting "madwifi" but it wasn't there. Also got lots of false positives when I let it try the drivers on its own.

These are all nits though. Way cool that it works so easy.

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rarsa
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#22 Post by rarsa »

Thank you for your notes, all good points.
rarsa wrote:Excuse the UI but that was the best I could do with the gtkdialog limitations. I will use a decent UI toolkit for the next release of the wizard. (You'll be blown away ;) )
I had already considered some of your UI suggestions but implementing them with gtkdialog increased the complexity of the code unessesarily.

I will keep them in mind when I redo the interface using a decent toolkit. Stay tunned.
PaulBx1 wrote:In the WPA screen, there is a button below that says "advanced". ...Isn't the "standard" way of doing it to rename that button "basic", to get back to the basic screen?
This is a very good example of what I mean.

Doing it in tcl --> One line of code
Doing it in bash + gtkdialog --> 20 lines of code that compounded with all the other "little things" make the code a mess.
PaulBx1 wrote:The basic screen did the job for me by the way.
Before it always showed all fields and that totally confused many new users, so I take your experience as a nod that hidding these fields is the right thing to do.
PaulBx1 wrote:In the advanced screen, you can enter "channel" or "frequency" IIRC. Of course those two are connected
I didn't know! can you tell me more?
PaulBx1 wrote:In the basic screen, it asked for "Name"....call it "Profile Name"
Another case of gtkdialog behaviour where the size of the text may affect the alignment of the fields unexpectedly. I had to play with names that would fit the alignment, instead of the other way around. go figure...
PaulBx1 wrote:I had a bit of problem with the driver selection too. Seemed strange to use a pci driver for a pcmcia card. I was expecting "madwifi" but it wasn't there.
I debated for a moment with my self, Should I use "human" labels or the actual driver name "madwifi", "hostap", "wext".

I couldnt come to a conclusion so I left it for the public to vote :)

Do I hear a vote for the actual driver name?

Or maybe it is that after messing around for so long you already knew the name of the driver where a person totally new to this would feel more comfortable with the "human" names?

On the new user interface I will be able to have fly over hints, context sensitive help, a better organized window real state, etc.

It's funny, one of the reasons why I haven't implemented the other "WPA" capabilities is because organizing the screens is so painful.

Oh, and BTW, I am mostly a UI developer with UI Design formal training, so I'm the first one to lament a less than clean interface.
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rarsa
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#23 Post by rarsa »

New version 2.14-5 !

I have uploaded a new version to test. Here are the changes:

Functional
- Scanning and selecting a scaned network should work now
- Deleting an existing profile should work now

UI
- Implemented changes sugested by PaulBx1: Advanced/Basic toggle, Name --> Profile Name.
- Moved the "New Profile" outside the list of profiles


You can get this version at the top of this thread

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 5040#95040
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copepod
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#24 Post by copepod »

rarsa, will this new wizard apply to the RT73 USB wifi, or are we better off sticking with Rutilt and/or editing rt73sta.dat to set up WPA?

Btw, you guys have done some great work implementing the rt73 driver in Puppy. Of all the distros I've played around with, only Puppy and PCLinuxOS seem to support it 'out of the box'.

Thanks.

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#25 Post by rarsa »

copepod wrote:rarsa, will this new wizard apply to the RT73 USB wifi, or are we better off sticking with Rutilt and/or editing rt73sta.dat to set up WPA?.
I'd still ask you to test the wizard. It should work although I don't know if I will need to ask tempestuous to add the ralink WPA driver and I have to add it as a driver option on the wizard. That's why the testing is required.

rutilt will still be there as an alternative to the wizard.
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tempestuous
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#26 Post by tempestuous »

Soon I will recompile wpa_supplicant with the patch for Ralink support.
I just realised that Ralink's native WPA support is limited to WPA-PSK, so wpa_supplicant is necessary for WPA-Enterprise (EAP).

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rarsa
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#27 Post by rarsa »

Tempestuous,

Have you looked at the wizard? Does the list of avaiable drivers make sense to you?

Atheros --> madwifi
Prism --> hostap
Other --> wext

Did I miss any other drivers that are included with the version you sent me?

And the list of ap_scan (considering the imposed limitation on space)?
Supplicant --> 1
Driver --> 0
Hidden --> 2
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tempestuous
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#28 Post by tempestuous »

rarsa, the only wifi adaptor I have at the moment is a Prism2.5-usb device which is supported by the prism2_usb driver and unique wlanctl-ng utility, not iwconfig.
So when I use your wizard, "Test wlan0" fails to show an interface, and I can't proceed to the configuration section of the wizard.
(This is no problem, because my device's firmware doesn't support WPA anyway.)

But what you have listed looks good. I presume this means the user will see -

Atheros
Prism
Other

I would just change "Prism" to "Prism2-3", otherwise PrismGT users will incorrectly think that their devices are supported.

And if I can successfully add the Ralink patch in the near future, you will need to add "Ralink".

Regarding "ap_scan" I confess I know very little about this. I had thought that it was a setting to accept or ignore the results of a scan for your chosen access point.

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#29 Post by rarsa »

what about the zydas driver? do zydas addapters work with wext?
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shockwave
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#30 Post by shockwave »

rarsa,

great addition. Since I am just getting it up and running this was a big help. I am still enable to connect, but that might possibly be because my card can't do wpa. Actually i just did some searching and it should have WPA support. it's a Buffalo Air Station WLI-CB-G54L. My password is entered using just letters, so I am not sure if that matters.

I can scan for and see my connection, and I can see that they talk, but I can't connect. WPA connection always fails.

The human names are great, but a roll over description would be great. Most people including myself don't really know what those options are.

Great work. I had to do much mroe work to get my wpa working on ubuntu

tempestuous
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#31 Post by tempestuous »

rarsa wrote:do zydas addapters work with wext?
Yes, according to this - http://zd1211.ath.cx/wiki/DriverRewrite in the "Status" section.
And this - http://zd1211.ath.cx/wiki/WPAConfiguration

shockwave, the bcm43xx driver is definitely compatible with wpa_supplicant.

shockwave
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#32 Post by shockwave »

tempestuous, thats what I found as well. What do you think my problem could be. I am running to other computers (ubuntu) off the same connection just fine. I have tried all the options given, but so far nothing? Any suggestions

tempestuous
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#33 Post by tempestuous »

You could try the manual setup explained here http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Wifi/wireless ... README.txt
or wait for others to report their results with the new wizard. There might be some bugs still to be fixed.

shockwave
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#34 Post by shockwave »

Thanks. I will look over the manual and see if that helps. I will keep checking back for help. I am really impressed and excited about linux and how far it is coming. This is a huge step forward. Its the furthest I have ever gotten with this machine.

tempestuous
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#35 Post by tempestuous »

EDIT: May 2nd 2007.
Ralink-patched version of wpa_supplicant seems not to work with Ralink wifi devices.
Puppy 2.14 has the latest version 0.5.7 of wpa_supplicant.
For earlier Puppies, it's available as a dotpup here -
http://puppyfiles.org/dotpupsde/dotpups ... utilities/

I just recompiled wpa_supplicant with Ralink support.
Unfortunately this support appears to be only for Ralink rt73 (USB) and rt61 (PCI/PCMCIA) drivers. It appears that rt2500 (PCI/PCMCIA) and rt2570 (USB) miss out.
I used the patch from the rt73 source code, which is slightly different to the patch from the rt61 source code, so it's possible that only the rt73 is supported with the new package. I now wonder whether this effort was worthwhile.

Anyway, we now have 1 new driver name and 2 new interface names to deal with:

-D ralink
-i rausb0 ## for rt73
-i ra0 ## for rt61

The good thing about the new package is that I compiled it against the same version of Linux Wireless Tools that Barry will be using in Puppy 2.14: version 29pre10 (libiw.so.29). So we should have good compatibility with Puppy 2.14.
Last edited by tempestuous on Wed 02 May 2007, 07:53, edited 1 time in total.

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