On Don, 2006-03-23 at 22:48 -0500, Chris Staub wrote: > Bruce Dubbs wrote: > > In reviewing BLFS, one area that is missing is wireless support. I'm > > not sure where to start with this. My first question is "Has anyone > > built the necessary packages to implement wireless communication on a > > BLFS system?" The next question would be to ask what packages are > > needed. I would think that there would be some drivers necessary and > > some applications to control the wireless connections.
> Really no mention of "drivers" needed - there are several in the kernel. Well, there are a few in the kernel but unfortunately there are a lot of different cards and some need drivers that are not yet or will never be in the kernel and some in-kernel drivers need firmware installed. As that's a rather large topic, it probably won't make sense to cover everything in BLFS... > All you really need is the wireless_tools package - > http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html. That's for very basic network setup only. Many wireless networks use WPA nowadays and that can't be configured with wireless_tools, you need wpa_supplicant[1] to do that. For laptops switching networks a graphical configuration tool is highly desirable, too. NetworkManager[2] is a nice system; it'd need a bit of work to add that to BLFS, though, and it's still a work in progress, not everything is configurable yet. I've written a wireless-applet[3] for GNOME some time ago, that's just a very simple frontend to configure wpa_supplicant but useful if you just want to easily get connected to non-encrypted and WEP/WPA-PSK wireless networks. There are graphical configuration tools for KDE, too, of course, don't know whether they support WPA, though. KNetworkManager, a NetworkManager frontend, supports that, AFAIK. Regards, Jürg [1] http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/ [2] http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/ [3] http://www.bitron.ch/software/wireless-applet.php -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
