WIFI Toys

A negative toy posting...

My nice new T42p was stolen by some loser at a PHP conference in Paris. It is amazingly inconvenient to lose a laptop like this. It was from inside the conference hall and there was virtually no non-geek traffic there. If a fellow geek actually stole my laptop from a PHP conference then there is something seriously wrong with the world. You can steal my car, my money, my shoes, I don't really care, but don't steal my damn laptop!

Now to determine what to replace it with. It took a while to get it configured nicely and I really don't have the time nor the energy to do that again. Perhaps a G4 Powerbook so I don't have to fiddle as much. Will be hard to give up that nice 1600x1200 Flexview display though.

This should be a fun toy when it shows up. I ordered a T42p today with the 15" 1600x1200 screen and a Dothan 1.8GHz CPU. Kept the RAM and HD low and will just add more later. Crucial doesn't list it yet, but I figure it uses DDR PC2700 non-parity RAM just like the T41p. Now to find a decent 80G 7200 rpm notebook drive to toss in it.

I did consider a Powerbook for a while, but I am too used to Linux and I really am more comfortable on a Thinkpad. One of the big draws of the Powerbook was the DVI-out on it, but with the Thinkpad mini-dock which is only $89, you get that anyway, and it's not like I will be tossing my 20" LCD into my backpack and bringing it with me, so the dock can just live permanently by the LCD for a very nice dual-headed workstation when I am working from home.

By the way, ordering this thing was amazingly painful. The ordering web site is/was completely messed up and there was no way to click your way to it. Had to call and have a human do it for me. If you are looking for one, I would suggest finding someone who works at IBM who will let you use their friends+family EPP discount and go in via www.ibm.com/shop/epp or if you own some IBM stock you can use the Shareholder Purchase Program at www.ibm.com/shop/us/spp to get a couple of hundred dollars off your price.

June 23rd Update: It finally arrived! Of course I am out of town so I can't play with it yet. Frustrating.

July 5th Update: Finally back in the country and have started playing with this beast. It's the same thickness as my old T20, about an inch wider and a bit over half and inch taller. But that Flexview display is amazing. And no, 1600x1200 looks just fine on it. I never really understood the argument that a display could be too small for a high resolution. Just set your font size to your liking. The higher resolution means your anti-aliased fonts have that much more definition to them making them clearer and easier to read which is exactly what you need on a "small" display.

I am waiting on another 512M of RAM and a speedy 7200 RPM 7K60 drive to install Debian on. I'll keep the 5K80 that came with it as a secondary XP drive that I can pop in the Ultrabay the one or two times a year I actually use Windows.

July 10 Update: Debian has gone onto this thing. It installed pretty smoothly. I always use this 31M XFS boot iso for installing Debian these days. To do a network install just remember to specify "e1000" when you get to the part that asks you which extra drivers to load. Here is my .config in case you are curious. I ended up using ATI's drivers for the FireGL T2 (basically a Radeon 9600 card) that is in it. There are also open source drivers (here) which work nicely, but the 3D acceleration wasn't very good.
If you follow these excellent instructions it is easy to get the ATI drivers going, and you will have very fast accelerated 3D. Make sure you build your own modules instead of trying the precompiled ones he lists. I had a world of problems with those, but as soon as I built my own against my 2.6.7 kernel everything started working. I used the "fglrxconfig" program to generate my XF86Config-4 file for just single-headed 1600x1200 for now. Need to play more with the port replicator and dual-headed stuff and also come up with a way to reliably connect to 1024x768 projectors. I am getting around 1785FPS from glxgears and 380FPS from fgl_glxgears (default window sizes). Offscreen fgl_glxgears runs at 1125FPS.

Sound works fine with the snd_intel8x0 driver, and the built-in a/b/g wireless works nicely with the madwifi driver. I use apt-get to grab it via this entry in my /etc/apt/sources.list file: Someone in the comments mentioned problems with pcmcia stuff, but I haven't seen any issues. Anything I plug in comes up right away.
Dual-booting to WinXP sitting on the original drive in the ultrabay worked on the first try. I added this to my /boot/grub/menu.lst file: The big thing I still need to work more on is ACPI and getting it to suspend and wake back up. It suspends perfectly right now, but it just won't come back out of suspend which makes the fact that it can suspend much less interesting.

Another interesting problem I hit was that if I used the Radeon Framebuffer to get a cool-looking console then the fglrx ATI driver would crash the system on switching between X and the console. If I don't use the framebuffer for the console everything is fine. Haven't tracked down a solution to this one. For now I just use the vesa framebuffer for the console which works well.

July 17 Update: I spend half my life on planes and the other half presenting. I haven't found any way to make the former easier on me as I absolutely hate flying, but for the latter I trawled the Net and came up with an idea by Klaus Weidner for running a vncserver and then a viewer onto that server session both on the local lcd and on the external vga port. That means that now when I present I can have the contents of the projector in a window on my desktop. This will be very nice, especially for my duller talks as I can read email or irc while presenting without people seeing that.

First, here is my XF86Config-4 file. Note the dual fglrx device sections and the dual screen sections and finally the single and dual ServerLayout sections. Unfortunately X is quite unhappy starting up with the dual layout if nothing is connected, but you can check that with a tpctl call. I use this little startx wrapper script: So I just need to restart X to have it automatically figure out if the second display should be enabled or not. Next, to run vncserver and the viewers along with a window manager (metacity) and a panel I use this script:
As far as my suspend problems go. The problem is the ATI fglrx driver. I would have to switch back to the radeon driver but then I would lose tv-out and some 3d-performance. Probably not a bad tradeoff actually.

The little Linksys WRT54G box is a terrific generic Linux platform to run just about any networking code on. I have found that the radio on it when cranked up to its full 84mw is better than any of my pcmcia cards including the 100mw Cisco-350 I normally use when I need to pick up some distant signal. I have this 5dbi Maxrad antenna I normally use with the Cisco card and even with that it doesn't match the sensitivity of the WRT54G with the stock antennas. I also picked up a dual diversity flat-patch antenna from Hyperlink to see if I could extend my packet detection range a bit. There is a picture of it in the extended entry. Also note the updated section at the end of the 54G and no Wires post.

For those that haven't run across it before, Kismet is a very handy 802.11 monitoring program which is used to detect wireless activity. There is a MIPS binary for kismet_drone and kismet_monitor at http://gattaca.ru/~nikki/wrt54g/kismet.tar.bz2. To get it up and running, first you need command-line access to your gateway. I suggest sticking this firmware on it. Just unzip and use the standard "upgrade firmware" option to switch to it. Reboot the box and under the Administration menu turn on telnet and under the wireless menu put it into Client mode. Uncompress the kismet tarball on some machine, telnet into the gateway and from /tmp either scp or wget the files into /tmp/kismet/bin and /tmp/kismet/etc. Edit the /tmp/kismet/etc/kismet_drone.conf file and make sure you pick the right source ethernet device based on your wrt version. For version 1.0 and 1.1 use eth2 and for a v2 gateway, use eth1.

# WRT v1, v1.1
source=wrt54g,eth2,wrt54g
# WRT v2
#source=wrt54g,eth1,wrt54g

To run it, first make sure you are not associated with a gateway already. It will actually still work, but it won't channel hop automatically. Also a good idea to make sure you don't send out any probes by sticking it into passive mode. I would suggest these steps:

wl disassoc
wl passive
wl scan
wl scanresults

The scan and scanresults is just to get a sense of whether there is anything out there. It will tell you if it sees any gateways and what their signal strengths (rssi) are. Here is the typical output from one of my gateways:

# wl scan
# wl scanresults
SSID: "Canada"
Mode: Managed   RSSI: -40 dBm   noise: -82 dBm  Channel: 3
BSSID: 00:06:25:C5:32:21        Capability: ESS WEP ShortSlot
Supported Rates: [ 1(b) 2(b) 5.5(b) 11(b) 18 24 36 54 6 9 12 48 ]

SSID: "Canada"
Mode: Managed   RSSI: -71 dBm   noise: -82 dBm  Channel: 3
BSSID: 00:0C:41:D3:99:E1        Capability: ESS WEP ShortSlot
Supported Rates: [ 1(b) 2(b) 5.5(b) 11(b) 18 24 36 54 6 9 12 48 ]

Now to run the drone, do this:

/tmp/kismet/bin/kismet_drone

You should see something like this:

Suid priv-dropping disabled.  This may not be secure.
No specific sources given to be enabled, all will be enabled.
Enabling channel hopping.
Disabling channel splitting.
Source 0 (wrt54g): Enabling monitor mode for wrt54g source interface eth2 channel 6...
Source 0 (wrt54g): Opening wrt54g source interface eth2...
Kismet Drone 3.1.0 (Kismet)
Listening on port 3501 (protocol 8).
Allowing connections from 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0

And now on your Linux box which should be connected directly to one of the switch ports on the gateway with an appropriate ip allocated for both gateway and Linux box, of course, find your kismet.conf file and put this in it:

source=kismet_drone,192.168.1.3:3501,drone

Now you are ready to fire up kismet. If everything worked and there are gateways out there you should see something like this:

Here you see my two other wrt gateways each with an essid of Canada, an mlife access point somewhere, one named WesClark(?!) and one named default. The colours indicate if they are using encryption and generally how secure they might be. Green means encryption is used, yellow means no encryption, but at least the default config has been changed in some way so it may not be trivial to access it and red means a gateway which is still running with its default wide-open config.