WPA Supplicant Support in Ubuntu Dapper
One of the continued nasty bits of running Linux on a laptop has been support for WiFi networks. The tools tend to be very capable when they exist, but support for hardware has been spotty (thanks mostly to the hardware manufactuers unfortunately) and the user facing tools have been unpolished at best. Just when things started to get better the security arms escalation required switching to WPA. There just hasn’t been support for the new encryption style at all in user facing tools.
I’m a Linux diehard however, so I do whatever I need to get WPA suport up and going on my laptops. Usually that means grabbing some tools, compiling them, sometimes the occasional bit of kernel hackery. Not bad for me, but really an unacceptable ordeal for lots of users. So I was really happy to see wpasupplicant show up in the Ubuntu Dapper repositories. It still requires editing config files instead of just using some nice squishy interface, and wpa_supplicant itself still looses sync for me every once in a while - requiring a manual restart of the interface. But at least it’s progress in the right direction. And it’s pretty well integrated with the system scripts, so it doesn’t feel like a nasty hack any more when bringing up an interface. The Linux based 770 has supported WPA since I first picked it up. I’m hoping that eventually we’ll see integration like that on general PC hardware.
I would recommend checking out the newest Ubuntu release if you’ve got a relatively high geek quotient but you’ve been staying away because of Wifi support. If the progress keeps up I think the
switching trend that some others have noted is going to keep rolling.
