Documentation is a Good Thing. Or would be.

[vakkotaur]

Wherein I relate more about wireless networking and WiFi Radar. Or rant about it.

Okkay, so I can get Wolvix to get a wireless connection reliably. But I have to do it all hands-on which is rather inconvenient, so I look at WiFi Radar -- not to be confused with the Windows program Easy WiFi Radar which did a bang-up job of clutter up my web search results.

A bit of minor weirdness worked out in my favor. It wouldn't launch from the icon and take the root password... don't know why not, and don't particularly care at the moment. But I could launch it from a terminal window where I was root. Ah, the controlling terminal -- the place that error messages get sent to. And there I see two things of interest.

First, while WiFi Radar can disconnect, it does not do so cleanly and complains about invalid arguments. It also leaves dhcpcd running without a network connection - which means that that process has to be killed before a reconnect can happen. Skimming the WiFi Radar code (it's in python) it looks like it should be taking care of that. I haven't dealt with all that, and for all I know it might be best left to the WiFi Radar developers.

Second, after getting the system back into a state I know get a connection started manually without fiddling around, I try WiFi Radar again and see that it tries.. and it passes its data fields unmodified to iwconfig. Why is that important? It is important because iwconfig expects passwords in hexadecimal, or if in plaintext to start with s: before the text password. Of course I was never getting a connection! 'password' is not at all 's:password' I changed that field and tried again and I finally saw WiFi Radar start a connection.

That is something that is not apparent from the WiFi Radar web site. There is no documentation or manual or even FAQ on the WiFi Radar web site. The program is supposed to make things easier, so I assumed (spare me the tired line about that, thanks) that it would deal with plain text passwords. One line that said something about how it treated passwords, or a FAQ entry about "I enter my password but it doesn't work. What's going on?" would have solved this for me some time ago. I've said I'll RTFM, but I have to know where the FM is. Well, there has to be an FM.

WiFi Radar still won't disconnect cleanly, but getting a connection with it is progress. Even with having to fiddle around a little, this still means WiFi Radar makes storing multiple wireless profiles easy and somewhat useful. Even in this condition, I might just install Wolvix on the laptop after all.

Of course, I am still quite interested in having WiFi Radar working 100%.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This is of course in the nature of open source. People write something that apparently works for them in one peculiar environment and distribute it that way. Others with differences in their environment try it and it doesn't work. Most chuck it in the trash, one or two set out to figure out what's wrong with it, and eventually improve it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The speed with which development takes place in a particular area depends on the number of people who feel a need for that particular feature.

I agree with you, the lack of some kind of documentation is often plain disgusting. Anyone who writes code and releases it for public use should feel obligated to at least describe in some terms what their code is supposed to do and how it is meant to be used.