On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:27 AM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Take two such laptops. > > Take them way out into the country so they can only communicate with > each other. > > There are no access points. No laptop is acting as an access point, either. > > Can those two laptops communicate? Under 802.11b/g, the answer is yes. > They are communicating in "ad-hoc" mode. Each can transmit packets and > the other one gets the packets. (This works for N laptops, not just two.) > > The IETF "ZeroConf" protocols provide for self-assignment of IP > addresses in such a case. (The same thing happens if you plug two > laptops together with a short Ethernet cable and no DHCP server.) > Once they self-assign IP addresses, the laptops can talk at an IP > level. They can send unicast, multicast, and broadcast packets to > each other. (If you look in the Mac Control Panel, you'll see this > reported as a "self-assigned IP address", with a warning that you > probably aren't connected to the global Internet, since most of the > time that was what you probably expected.) > > Does the OLPC Presence Service work in such a case?
Yes, that is exactly what telepathy-salut does, using avahi. You can also take two Nokia N800s and chat between them, or two laptops at a conference running a telepathy-based jabber client like Empathy, and chat between them - all ad-hoc, no infrastructure required. Morgan _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
