Archive for November, 2007

Using a Wireless Router as an Access Point (Bridge)

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Here at the Mono Summit we had not-so-great Internet access. One of the things we tried to remedy this was to plug in our own routers. This was itself an adventure as the network did not have any DHCP and wasn’t very friendly to us. We used etherape, wireshark, and a switch to figure out the settings on the not-so-reliable but very attractive Cisco Aironet 1130AG and put these settings on a Linksys WRT54G. Aaron Bockover got that hack working eventually. This alone wouldn’t improve the situation much so we added a couple more routers to the network. Ideally you would use a simple access point to do this so that everyone would be on the same subnet and have fewer NAT routers to go through.

Real APs are hard to come by these days but you can use a wireless router as an AP by plugging in one of it’s LAN (not WAN) ports into a LAN port of your router. There are a few more things you must do for this to work properly:

  • Plug one of the APs LAN (not WAN) ports into a LAN port on the router (may require a crossover cable)
  • Disable the DHCP server on the AP
  • Change the internal IP address of the AP to something different than the router (but on the same subnet)

Without these you will have conflicts that will prevent anyone from getting out to the Internet. If you were at the conference and wondered why we didn’t have Internet most of Thursday (and some of Wednesday) this is why.

In theory it should be possible to use the same SSID for each of the routers and clients will roam between them but we didn’t want to push our luck. Also I don’t know if roaming would distribute the load evenly whereas we hoped that folks would choose an AP more or less randomly. This is not the same thing as WDS.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

XPInstall for Plugins

Friday, November 16th, 2007

One of my first assignments on the Moonlight team was to create an installer for Firefox so that users would be able to click on a single link and have the plugin installed and working without having to restart the browser. Thanks to reasonably good documentation on Mozilla’s site the installer is done.

XPInstall actually provides you with two ways of installing add-ons (extensions, plugins, themes, etc.). The newer method uses an Install Manifest to describe the add-on. The older method uses an install script. We’d love to use the newer method but unfortunately it requires that the user restart the browser.

At first I got a lot of reports that, even using the older install method, people had to restart their browsers to get the plugin working, or at least open about:plugins. Turns out there’s a JavaScript method, refreshPlugins, to reload the plugins, and optionally to reload open pages (to load the content the plugin is supposed to handle).

The current status is that the installer works well for both the Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 profiles (without and with a CLR). Another cool thing to mention is that the current 64-bit 1.1 installer is under 7MB (compressed) without any real work on optimizing for size.

Posted in Mono, Technology | Comments Closed

Bluetooth in openSUSE 10.3

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

There’s some great new bluetooth stuff available now for Linux but it didn’t quite make it into openSUSE 10.3. Most important to me is the ability to add a bluetooth mouse from a GUI and have it work every time you turn it on. GUI for using bluetooth audio devices is coming soon.

bluetooth-preferences.pngadd-device.pngauthorization.png

To get this stuff into openSUSE you’ll want to:

Add the GNOME:Community repository and install / upgrade bluez-gnome and bluez-utils.

Enable bluetooth using the YaST Bluetooth tool or by setting START_SERVICES="yes" and running SuSEconfig.

Have a look at /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and make sure it doesn’t have much more than this:

options { security user; }

Some of the other stuff that gets put in there by default can get in your way. It’s safe to just delete the other stuff. In fact it’s probably safe to remove this section as well.

Then log out and back in again or reboot or start the bluetooth services and run bluetooth-preferences.

Posted in Technology, openSUSE | 3 Comments »

Favorite GNOME Bug

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Now that XRandR 1.2 is working so well I change resolutions a lot (between my laptop display and the larger one sitting on my desk) which brings an old favorite GNOME bug to the forefront for me: Applets on the right of a panel change positions and order when display resolution is changed.

There are a number of related bugs already in bugzilla and one can see from other bug reports that a number of GNOME developers have thought about this problem and wanted to solve it.

My personal take on this is that the panel should not touch the position or right_stick settings of an applet at all but should only try it’s best to interpret them in a sane way. It seems to be changing the positions when the size of the panel changes, probably trying to do the right thing.

The possibility of treating the gnome-panel more like Firefox treats it’s tool bars, with all positions being relative and fixed and variable width spacers, is also reasonable. In the mean time I’ve written a script that resets the broken positions and reloads the panel. This reveals bugs in applications that don’t handle a reloaded notification area (including network-manager-gnome) but I can just restart those as well.

Posted in Technology | Comments Closed