[Debian-eeepc-devel] WPA support in installer: netcfg and wpasupplicant patches

[Ben Armstrong]

On 21/06/10 12:03 PM, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> Will the Squeeze installer support WPA?
>
> For some time, Glenn Saberton's patches have been available to support 
> WPA, but discussing this with Otavio on irc, he reminded me that we 
> need changes not only to netcfg, but also wpasupplicant.  Here's the 
> last message I could find dealing with the topic:
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2009/12/msg00364.html
>
> Unfortunately, only a patch for netcfg was provided at that time, and 
> in any case, the patch would undoubtedly need to be brought up-to-date 
> again.
>
> The git repos for both netcfg and wpasupplicant (now very out of date) 
> are here:
>
> git://git.debian.org/git/debian-eeepc/netcfg.git
> git://git.debian.org/git/debian-eeepc/wpasupplicant.git
>
> It would be nice if this could make it into Squeeze, as one of the 
> distinctive features of the custom installer we (the Debian Eee PC 
> team) made for Lenny was that you could install over WPA.  Because of 
> the ultraportability of these machines and lack of optical drive, we 
> found many people wanted to be able to install wherever they were from 
> the network, and that mostly meant using wireless.  But we are 
> dropping support for this custom installer in Squeeze and now 
> recommend that people use the standard installer instead, so without 
> support in the standard installer, our users are now faced with a loss 
> in functionality.

I have yet to hear back from anyone from debian-boot about this.  I 
guess if we're to have any chance of getting it in, someone needs to do 
the work of providing those patches and filing them on bug #550744.  Any 
takers?

Ben