Wi-Fi Stack With Atheros Driver Ready For Testing

After the exciting news of the Alpha 1 release, another bit of good news poured in. Colin Günther has been working on creating a Haiku WIFI stack for the WIFI bounty over at Haikuware. The stack, which he is creating as a part of his MSc Thesis, is currently a port of the FreeBSD 8.0 WLAN Stack. His further plans are described in his blog, where he writes about his progress.

Yesterday, he announced that the stack is ready for testing. One caveat: only the atheros driver is completed for unsecured networks. If you own such a wireless card, head on over to the call for testers on the Wi-Fi wiki. The atheros driver should cover most netbooks; here is a list of the supported devices. Colin left the following notes for those interested in testing:

What to expect of the WLAN-Stack:

• auto connect to an unsecured (open) WLAN
• wlan device will appear as an ethernet card
• full support of Haiku's network configuration utilities (Network preflet, ifconfig)
• no WLAN specific configuration utility (neither GUI, nor CLI)
• no listing of available WLANs