BBB - BeagleBone Black WiFi Settings

I'm often amazed at how many people seem to have problems with WiFi on Linux on SBCs.

Certainly maybe 4 or 5 years ago wifi could be a pain but these days the problems should largely be a thing of the past.  That does tend to mean that the blame mostly falls on the distros.

Your config looks ok to me, the only fly in the ointment being that with a different network card it may not be ra0, but could be wlan0, ath0, or even just eth1... and that's before you get to the distro installing some odd naming rules into udev and making it even worse.

Other than that, and presence of the appropriate firmware if required, it should just work with any wifi adapter.

I'm often amazed at how many people seem to have problems with WiFi on Linux on SBCs.

Certainly maybe 4 or 5 years ago wifi could be a pain but these days the problems should largely be a thing of the past.  That does tend to mean that the blame mostly falls on the distros.

Your config looks ok to me, the only fly in the ointment being that with a different network card it may not be ra0, but could be wlan0, ath0, or even just eth1... and that's before you get to the distro installing some odd naming rules into udev and making it even worse.

Other than that, and presence of the appropriate firmware if required, it should just work with any wifi adapter.

selsinork wrote:

 

I'm often amazed at how many people seem to have problems with WiFi on Linux on SBCs.

Personally, I'm amazed that normal people can get networking to work at all.  I used to write datacom software (mostly at the device/link layer rather than the network/application layer) and the are so many things that can go wrong, it seems like pure luck when people are able to get all the settings right.

Your config looks ok to me, the only fly in the ointment being that with a different network card it may not be ra0, but could be wlan0, ath0, or even just eth1... and that's before you get to the distro installing some odd naming rules into udev and making it even worse.

I think you just proved my point.

John Beetem wrote:

 

I think you just proved my point.

Probably    It's my feeling that the distro should make it all transparent and easy, at least for the common cases.  That it's fairly simple to do, but they still don't is the puzzling part.

You're right that there's so much to go wrong, but the common case is likely to be one wired network port and one wifi on either an SBC or Laptop. Typically only one wired for a desktop. These cases are trivial to get right out of the box.

Something acting as a router or using vlans is typically complex enough that the default networking setup in the distro can't cope anyway, so trying to do so and forcing that complexity onto the common case is highly counter productive.

Still, It's probably also true that some people will still manage to break things no matter how easy it's been made

Hi Selsinork,

Excellent, thanks for checking the configs. I was worried tweaks/config changes beyond the interface name may be needed, but good to know that it should be ok for many WiFi adapters,

I suppose there may be people out there still using WEP, so you should probably add a section to the supplicant config something like this

network={

     ssid="you have been compromised already"

     key_mgmt=none

     auth_alg=OPEN

     wep_key0=0123456789abcdef0123456789

     wep_key1=0123456789abcdef0123456789

     wep_key2=0123456789abcdef0123456789

     wep_key3=0123456789abcdef0123456789

}

while adding a big red disclaimer pointing out that using WEP is a very silly idea.

There's also some other settings that can change depending on exactly how the AP is configured, but in general the defaults for most APs have all the WPA2 algorithms enabled, so usually not a big problem.

Anyone who has a desktop installed should probably just use wpa_gui, assuming it's available, to configure their connection.

The people who have some interesting non-default configuration on their AP will likely already know that and have sufficient knowledge to sort it out themselves. So much better to focus on the common case that'll get the people with little experience of wifi on linux up and running quickly and easily

selsinork wrote:

     ssid="you have been compromised already"

 

...

while adding a big red disclaimer pointing out that using WEP is a very silly idea.

 

Haha yes I think that's important to mention.

Excellent, thanks for the all off the suggestions. I've taken them and reworded the page to have general instructions, followed by any Wifi-adapter-specific instructions (e.g. driver issues) where needed.