[TAG] Answer blog

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 11:26:59AM -0800, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
> 
> Just to be completely clear. I have not managed to get two laptops
> to communicate with each other using ad-hoc mode. Both sides say the
> (wireless) link is up, but I couldn't get them to send IP packets to
> each other. I have only managed to get an IP link when there is a
> common access point (hub).

That's something I'd really like to learn to do myself. I've thought
about it on occasion, and it always seemed like a doable thing - but I
never got any further than that, so a description of the actual setup
would be a really cool thing.

When I read about those $100 laptops that Negroponte et al are cranking
out, I pictured a continent-wide wireless fabric of laptops stretching
across, say, Africa - with some sort of a clever NAT and
bandwidth-metering setup on each machine where any host within reach of
an AP becomes a "relay station" accessible to everyone on that WAN.
Yeah, it would be dead slow if there were only a few hosts within reach
of APs... but the capabilities of that kind of system would be awesome.

> The problem is that getting wireless cards to work with Linux has
> been such a complicated issue in the past that most HOWTO's spend a
> lot of time in explaining how to download and compile the relevant
> kernel modules and load firmware. The authors are probably exhausted
> by the time they got to the details of setting up networking :)

I must say that, in this case, "the Devil is not as bad as he's
painted". In my experience of wireless cards under Linux has consisted
of

1) Find the source on the Net and download it;
2) Unpack the archive in /usr/src/modules;
3) 'make; make install' the module and add it to the list in
	"/etc/modules".

Oh, and run 'make; make install' every time you recompile the kernel.
Not what I'd call terribly difficult.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *