[Replicant] WiFi and Replicant

Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic tiberiu at tehnoetic.com
Wed Mar 2 21:37:39 UTC 2016


Hi,

On 02.03.2016 22:47, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:
> Paul told me you were researching how to get out of the box WiFi support
> in Replicant (This means that Replicant doesn't ship non-free firmware).
> 
> I don't know what you did on your side.

I've been able to build the system with the kernel modules needed for
AR9271 (some patching was needed), then flash the system onto a
Tehnoetic S2 phone, load the modules, plug in the Tehnoetic wifi adapter
using an OTG cable, verify in dmesg that the adapter is recognized and
that the ath9k_htc driver loads the free firmware v1.3.1. Then the new
wireless network interface wlan0 showed up in iwconfig.

https://tehnoetic.com/tehnoetic-wireless-adapter-gnu-linux-libre-tet-n150
https://tehnoetic.com/tehnoetic-s2-phone-replicant

I would like to go again through the patches before proposing them for
commit in the repository, but I can share them at any time.

What I need to do now is to have wpa_supplicant and everything ready in
the user space so that users don't have to run shell commands to be able
to connect to wifi in freedom. This part is newer to me because it's
Android-specific, and I'm documenting myself. If you or someone else has
any pointers to the user space part of the problem, please let me know.

> On mine, I've started documenting the issue here:
> https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/WiFi
> 
> I think ath9k claims need to be verified:
> -> Are all the chips really that big?
> -> Does it consume that much power? Was it ever measured?

The Tehnoetic mini wifi adapter is small and also it seems it receives
enough power from the Tehnoetic S2 phone I tested with. People can also
use a Y USB OTG cable with the wifi adapter and an external battery, but
that's more inconvenient.

-- 
Tiberiu
Founder, https://tehnoetic.com


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