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

[Ben Armstrong]

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The git repos for both netcfg and wpasupplicant (now very out of date) 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.

Thanks,
Ben