Re: Surprise - olpc sugar uses NM

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-12-27 at 19:35 +0100, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 10:15:57AM -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 27, 2007 at 09:53:25AM -0600, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> > > I was surprised to see that the olpc running the sugar operating system
> > > runs NM. olpc (product of the one computer one child project) if MIT's
> > > Negroponte. The idea is to mass produce cheap computers for children in
> > > third world countries.
> 
> Not such a big surpise. One of the upstream authors of NM used to work on
> the OLPC project :)

Yep; that's one of the reasons why NM 0.7 has taken so long to come out.
Most of my time from the summer of '06 to summer of '07 was taken up
working on OLPC.

> > > The connection interface is interesting. It is a screen of colored dots
> > > each one a AP or a mesh connection, which is a connection to another
> > > olpc.It is more colorful than NM-applet.
> > 
> > I just received one of these but have not had much time with it.  I
> > did notice that the display showed my local access points, but also
> > displayed a few "mesh" connections.  I doubt that there are really any
> > around.
> 
> There are always three mesh connections available in the meshview. Those
> represent mesh networks on different channels (if you hover over it, you'll
> see).. Mesh networks are created as soon as one or more nodes ``join'' one.
> 
> > In my quick attempt I was not able to get the wireless to work on my
> > WPA-enabled access point.  Do you have any tips?
> 
> There are/were some issues with WPA and WEP. I'm not sure in which builds these
> problems occur. Search for WEP and WPA on dev.laptop.org, it should have the
> needed information.

There's been a lot of churn in the libertas driver lately that's causing
most of these issues; the NM version has stayed the same for quite a
while.  There are one or two changes that might make NM work better here
but Marco didn't see a large difference when he was testing WPA stuff
with me on the XO last week.  Especially with joyride builds, it'll be
rocky.  The WPA passphrase hashing support in 645 (and the G1G1 builds)
or so was broken due to sugar itself trapping SIGCHLD which caused the
sugar bits to be unable to find out when wpa_passphrase was finished,
and therefore WPA connections wouldn't work.

The historical problems with NM + libertas were either (a)
driver-behavior related, or (b) people couldn't make up their mind what
the mesh behavior should be, and what it's interaction with
infrastructure mode should be.

Dan