 |
 |
 |
|
 |
You are not logged in.
Has anyone given other UNIces a try on the Eee? I'd like to set mine up as a mobile security penetration/testing machine, so naturally things like WEP cracking are important to me - As far as I know, though, Linux's Atheros wireless support is still a little spotty. I haven't yet heard of anyone getting Kismet to run reliably under Linux on the Eee.
But OpenBSD's Atheros support is reportedly flawless.
When I get my Eee (supposedly 2-3 weeks now), I'm going to give it a try. Has anyone else attempted similar?
Offline
no but would love to learn more about it
if bsd doesnt work for you
there is a distro specific to network and security
check distrowatch.com
Offline
I've not tried obsd on here, however the obsd ath driver is very similar to madwifi's ath5k driver. The ath5k does not yet support this wificard. It is fairly close, but due to the card being b/g and all of the others in this class being a/b/g it needs some new initaliazation routines (this is roughy what their site says).
I ripped apart my eee this morning to try and replace the atheros with an intel 3945 but it appears non-atheros cards are not supported by the bios. Some madwifi folks suggested a workaround but it involves a level of programing that I don't have.
I put the atheros card back in the eee and I wait.
Offline
I know a little about linux and nothing about OpenBSD. What is the general difference between the two?
Offline
The kernel the c library, most of the console tools. You install packages (like ubuntu/arch) or buiild from ports (gentoo). Their hardware support tends to not be as up to date. OpenBSD is very secure, NetBSD runs on everything including toasters, and FreeBSD is probably the most desktopy/x86 version.
The most obvious difference is the license for the base utilities (although most BSD still use GCC). BSD uses the BSD license and Linux is GPL. BSD license basically says "you can do whatever you want with this but if it breaks something, its not my fault). The GPL has more requirements from a distribution point of view with the goal of keeping the code "free".
This is very much a summary so if other people want to be more pedantic feel free. I've been in too may BSD vs Linux debates to care anymore. BSD is always my preference but I'm running Ubuntu on the eee as its easier with a bit better hardware support.
(Not intended to start a holy war with anyone).
Offline
spazdor wrote:
Has anyone given other UNIces a try on the Eee?
As would I. A *nix laptop is the holy grail of going paperless office for me as the rest of my office except for one proprietary windows box is FreeBSD. But I'm so accustomed to FreeBSD I just don't know how I'm going to get used to Linux again. (I suspect we'll both manage)
Perhaps when these become a bit more widely available we'll see some ports. I'm very optimistic. Your OpenBSD and my FreeBSD seem to freely borrow from each other so perhaps we'll come up on our preferred platforms close to each other and in the not too distant future?
Offline
Well I've done some more reading on this subject. OpenBSD may or may not support the ath card in the eee. From what I've read, they are not exactly sure if the ath driver in the newest versions of OpenBSD with the new driver. The real killer for me is that OpenBSD doesn't support WPA/WPA2 at all. That's a non-starter for me. It is required in many situations and I'm not going to rebuild my whole network with VPNs etc to use Open. Open also lacks a driver for the wired ethernet card at this time.
Moving to FreeBSD, well, FreeBSD uses basically the madwifi drivers (written for FBSD). The guy who writes the HAL for the atheros cards (sam) is a freebsd developer. That said, the HAL hasn't been updated there in awhile yet and the last posting I saw from Sam on the fbsd list was that he hopes to have some time to work on these issues after FreeBSD 7.0 is out.
However, FBSD does have NDISulator/Project Evil which works similar to NDISwrapper. YMMV.
Offline
quagga wrote:
Well I've done some more reading on this subject. OpenBSD may or may not support the ath card in the eee. From what I've read, they are not exactly sure if the ath driver in the newest versions of OpenBSD with the new driver. The real killer for me is that OpenBSD doesn't support WPA/WPA2 at all. That's a non-starter for me. It is required in many situations and I'm not going to rebuild my whole network with VPNs etc to use Open. Open also lacks a driver for the wired ethernet card at this time.
No WPA would be OpenBSD deal killer for me too.
Moving to FreeBSD, well, FreeBSD uses basically the madwifi drivers (written for FBSD). The guy who writes the HAL for the atheros cards (sam) is a freebsd developer. That said, the HAL hasn't been updated there in awhile yet and the last posting I saw from Sam on the fbsd list was that he hopes to have some time to work on these issues after FreeBSD 7.0 is out.
However, FBSD does have NDISulator/Project Evil which works similar to NDISwrapper. YMMV.
Awesome news. The sam fellow does seem to be busy in a good way. From the man page on my 7.0beta3 box ath(4):
The ath driver provides support for wireless network adapters based on the Atheros AR5210, AR5211, and AR5212 programming APIs
Are any of those the controller in the Eee? I see a lot of activity on the current list regarding WPA issues that I don't know enough about to comment on. Maybe this means -CURRENT is where an Eee user would want to be?
If FedEx doesn't drop the ball this week I'll try to post something over the weekend on 4G Surf and installation attempts.
Offline
I want to say its a AR5212 but it varies depending on the info. Sometimes it looks to be a 5007 which doesn't have support.
In any case, it won't work in FreeBSD as that driver uses the hal layer (which is busted in both linux/FreeBSD). NDISulator should work however. I use NDISwrapper without issue in Ubuntu although I don't have monitor mode.
Offline
I have tried both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. There is a hack for FreeBSD that involves recompiling the Kernel to get the Eee's version of the ath0 device working. I don't think it will work on OpenBSD. I prefer openbsd because that is what I know best, but I'm using FreeBSD now and its ok... This afternoon I plan to try DesktopBSD and see if I can make an easy Eee install disk with wifi working out of the box.
Edit: The FreeBSD hack uses a special version of MadWifi's ar5007 hack.
Last edited by cal (2008-02-18 12:25:52 pm)
Offline