Freerunner & wireless internet

[Helge Hafting]

Juan Lucas Dominguez Rubio wrote:
> Hello, list:
>  
> has anyone ever accessed the internet via wifi from the Freerunner? If 
> so, which distro was it? Does it work only with some particular (few?) 
> routers?

I have done it, with SHR.
There are a few quirks. work around them, and it is no worse than
any other linux distro. The quirks I have seen:

1. The wireless does not work after the phone wakes from suspend.
    And I don't mean it lost the association, wifi cannot be
    brought up at all. Very irritating, for wpa_supplicant can
    re-associate automatically _if_ the chip & driver itself works.

    Workaround: unload the ar6000 module and reload it. Then
    it works as usual. The problem is, it has to be done manually
    and the phone is almost always sleeping (as it should), so
    this workaround has to be done all the time. which is why I
    don't normally use wifi. :-(

    Considering that the workaround is so simple, fixing
    the kernel should be simple too. Drivers have hooks
    for suspend/resume. So just make the resume handler
    do exactly the same initialization as when the module
    is loaded. wpa_supplicant can then do the rest, any association
    will be lost anyway after a long sleep.



2. When the module is freshly loaded, setting the essid is "unsupported"
    until an encryption key has been set. (iwconfig returns with an
    error message if I try setting the essid first.) This probably
    cause trouble for any sw that tries to set the essid first.

    My workaround is to set the encryption key first.

    The simplest (but not necessarily the best) kernel fix would be
    to have driver initialization explicitly set some key as the last
    step. Then users wouldn't have to.



Helge Hafting