Wireless

wlan=essid,key

To join a secured wireless network with ESSID 'foo' and password 'francisco' append wlan=foo,francisco

Webconverger supports both WEP and WPA, though your Wireless access point should be using WPA for your security.

To join an unsecured network called 'w', append wlan=w,. Notice the trailing comma, this is because some ESSIDs have spaces.

To join any open network, append wlan=, to the boot options. This relies on some wpa-supplicant magic that needs testing. If you do join an unsecured wireless network, do remember you have little security until you connect with https/SSL !!

To join an ESSID with spaces, you need to entity encode it. Example ESSID "Hopstock Gjestenett", becomes:

wlan=Hopstock%20Gjestenett,

Track developments in webconverger.init.

PLEASE BUY LINUX COMPATIBLE WIRELESS HARDWARE !!!

• List of Linux compatible WLAN hardware

Please purchase Linux compatible wireless hardware. Else making your wireless work with Webconverger will be very difficult!

Other wireless chipsets known to work:

• most Intel based wireless cards
• most atheros based cards
• ipw3945
• ipw2200
• ipw2100
• rt2x00
• rt2570
• ipw4965AGN
• 5100BG
• 5100ABG
• 5100AGN
• 5300AGN
• 5350AGN

Wireless devices that require Window's drivers wrappers such as ndiswrapper or fw-cutter etc. are too painful to integrate with Webconverger. In many cases it simply cannot be done without actually having the device and preparing 'one off' packages.

Further links regarding Wireless hardware

• Debian wireless page
• Ubuntu wireless page

Getting a Windows wireless device working (for developers only)

This is a developer reference.

Get the Win32 drivers:

x40:~/webc/wifi% ls
ar5523.bin  ar5523.sys  net5523.cat  net5523.inf

Prime your chroot:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils ndiswrapper-source

Build the ndiswrapper module for your distribution and architecture:

m-a prepare
m-a a-i ndiswrapper

With any luck, you'll have made a Debian package, like:

/usr/src/ndiswrapper-modules-2.6.22-2-686_1.47-2+2.6.22-4_i386.deb

Install that package. You want that in your config/chroot_local-packages.

Configure your (chroot) system for the device

sudo ndiswrapper -i net5523.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -l
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Another guide.

Wireless router (recommended)

A Linksys WRT54G in Wireless Client mode is a very good solution for wireless kiosk access. They are about 50USD and this dedicated hardware provides excellent Wireless access without the complication of often proprietary Wireless drivers for each client. The highly recommended Linksys WRT54G allows at least four machines to easily plug into the router.

Also the blog entry on this topic: Better Routing wanted

Recommended firmware:

• dd-wrt