Running Free with Linux
By Roman Vichr2005-04-21
Friendly Tools
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Now, look at some utilities that provide a more user friendly front-end to additional management tools available for managing Wi-Fi. You'll find links to all of these tools in the Resources section as well.
IfPlugd/waproamd
waproamd is a roaming daemon for wireless IEEE 802.11 NICs supporting Linux wireless extensions (v15 or newer), and was tested on Debian Linux. It is intended to configure WEP keys according to the networks found. The waproamd utility scans iteratively for wireless networks. When the NIC is associated with an available network, waproamd does not perform any more scans, but attaches the NIC card to the discovered access point. The scan can be tested using the command iwlist scan. waproamd supports host_roaming as defined by the Host AP driver. When using waproamd, do not forget to install a firewall; the utility itself does not protect against intrusion.
KWiFiManager
KWiFiManager is a tool for configuring and monitoring your wireless LAN PC card under a KDE environment on Linux; the tool itself is written for version 3.x of KDE. It uses the Linux kernel wireless extensions, so most wireless cards are supported from the pcmcia-cs package. This could be problematic, however, if you use drivers from the wlan-ng project for your card, because these drivers are not 100 percent compatible with the wireless extensions. You can give it a try anyway, or you can use the Host AP driver for the same card, which is wireless extension-compatible.
KWiFiManager comes distributed as an RPM package; however, there are a few prerequisites for installation. These prerequisites are the Qt toolkit (version 3.0.3+), KDE 3.x, and glibc2.2. After these packages are ready, the standard ./configure make make install compiles and installs the tool. The application offers several displays: Signal Quality, Connection Speed, Current Configuration, Access Point monitor, Statistics Viewer, and Configuration Editor (the last display is only accessible to the root user).
Glink, a link monitor and configurator for 802.11b cards using the Linux kernel with wireless extensions, is, roughly speaking, the GNOME equivalent for this.
APHunter
Written in Perl, APHunter provides the output of an iwlist scan in a text file. The documentation for this utility can be called by the command perldoc -t ./aphunter. The utility offers several switches to control its output and indicators.
GKrellMWireless
This utility requires a Linux kernel with wireless extensions. The utility requires a C library to compile and, consequently, is installed using (g)make. (Under BSD, you'll need to add extra headers for installation: if_wavelan_ieee.h and if_aironet_ieee.h.) This utility shows the wireless link quality, link level, and noise. Its latest version can show level and noise in dbm under Linux.
Tutorial Pages:
» A Variety of Tools and Projects Help Get Wireless Linux Off the Ground
» A Linux Wireless Access Point: Build or Buy?
» Friendly Tools
» Interoperability Issues
» Linux's Wireless Future
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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