Anybody use wifi-radar or another AP search/associate GUI tool? I've attempted wifi-radar and have had no luck but I think that is mainly because the wlan tools in the OS won't let my Prism2 based card scan for APs....

Anyway, what does everybody else use?

-- vino

I just got wifi-radar working... kernel 2.6.11.11 and Slackware current and Orinoco Gold pcmcia card. I'm going to try and get it working on my Ubuntu hard drive also, now that I figured out how to make it work - it took me a while.

You have to patch your kernel first, to allow scanning, then install the wifi-radar package... then update the sudoers file to allow your user to launch wifi-radar.

Like I said - it took a while. It'll be nice when this stuff is easier one day...

Noxious,

Good news regarding AP radar.... Let me know if you get it working on Ubuntu since this is the distro I've got running.

-- vino

screw it... Ubuntu is fine for using the applications that are on it's straight-and-narrow path - venture into apparently uncharted territory and you're on your own.

First off, the kernel sources aren't installed by default, so you have to find/install those.

Then, you try and patch the (in my case) orinoco modules, and find that there is something called "QT" that the compiler needs to work. You have to find something with QT in the name (the compiler didn't elaborate), install that, then re-attempt.

"Make" still gave me errors, so I found a web page about installing a custom kernel, to try this in a way that I had experience with in Slackware... That failed as well...

About this time, I figured that I had invested more than enough time in this - there is no reason this should be this difficult. I gave up before I hopelessly torched the default kernel on my Ubuntu hard drive.

Ubuntu seems fine for those that want easy, fast Linux installs... but, don't have any need to install packages outside of a repository.

I'm sticking to Slackware....

Okay, I got wifi-radar working... it took installing a custom kernel (mainly so I knew where the modules, sources, etc. were really installed) - follow these directions:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelCompile

After the new kernel is installed use the patch to allow the(in my case) Orinoco Gold Pcmcia card to scan (It does not have this ability without the patch). One source of the patch is here:

http://ozlabs.org/people/dgibson/dldwd/

I used "orinoco-0.15rc1.tar.gz"... from what I understand, it the one that's supposed to work with the 2.6 kernels... and it does.

Oh, and the kernel I installed is 2.6.11.11 from www.kernel.org.

After the new kernel is installed and patched, all there is to do is install wifi-radar - move wifi-radar to /usr/sbin (make it executable by typing "chmod +x /usr/sbin/wifi-radar), then move wifi-radar.sh to /usr/bin.

After a reboot (so the kernel can realize it can scan now), wifi-radar is started (from a root terminal) by typing "wifi-radar.sh".

Now, as easy as it is to open a root terminal in Ubuntu, I wanted to be able to start wifi-radar from an icon - as much as this makes me gnash my teeth in Gnome 2.10 (that I can't add launchers to the Applications menu - grrrrrrr... but I digress...) So, what I ended up doing, and it works, was to go to a root terminal, and type "visudo" to edit the sudoers file. After going down to the end of the text, I added "username TAB ALL=/usr/bin/wifi-radar.sh". Username would be YOUR username, then nothing after that but one hit on the TAB key, then typing the ALL=/usr/bin/wifi-radar.sh. Save by hitting the F2 key and when it asks whether you want to write this file as sudo, say "y" and it will.

After all this, I added a launcher to the bottom panel.