Installing Wifi Radar

This page documents installing Wifi-Radar on Debian (Etch) and Ubuntu (Hoary).Wifi-Radar is a simple utility for managing wireless networks. It’s very useful if you connect to more than one wireless network, each of which has different settings.

Although the .deb package used in this document is designed for Ubuntu, it has been shown to work on Debian Etch too.

1. Ensure you have the following packages installed: python, python-gtk2, wireless-tools. You probably have all of those packages installed already. They are installed as standard on Ubuntu and are likely to be installed on a Debian system configured for general desktop use and for use with a wireless card. You can try to install the packages anyway: If you already have them installed, trying to install them again won’t have any bad side-effects.

2. You can test if you already have the python package installed by entering python at the command line. You should see something like this:

tony@davros:~$ python Python 2.3.5 (#2, Jun 19 2005, 13:28:00)  [[GCC|3.3.6 (Debian 1:3.3.6-6)]] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 

• Press Ctrl-D to quit.

• You can test if you have the wireless tools installed by running iwconfig –help from the command line as root. You should see something similar to the following:

# iwconfig --help Usage: iwconfig interface [[essid|{NN|on|off}]]                           [[nwid|{NN|on|off}]]                           [mode {managed|ad-hoc|...}                           [freq N.NNNN[k|M|G]]                           [[channel|N]]                           [[ap|{N|off|auto}]]                           [[sens|N]]                           [[nick|N]]                           [[rate|{N|auto|fixed}]]                           [[rts|{N|auto|fixed|off}]]                           [[frag|{N|auto|fixed|off}]]                           [[enc|{NNNN-NNNN|off}]]                           [[power|{period N|timeout N}]]                           [[txpower|N {mW|dBm}]]                           [commit]        Check man pages for more details.

1. On new Debian systems, the dhcp3-client package is the default DHCP client version. However, on systems that have been upgraded from Woody or older versions, you may have the dhcp-client package installed instead. Use apt-get install dhcp3-client dhcp3-common to get the newer version. The older version will be removed.

2. Download the .deb file from http://master.grad.hr/~ivoks/ubuntu/. The file you want is (at time of writing) wifi-radar_1.9.4-0ubuntu4_all.deb

3. Install the package as root using the command dpkg -i wifi-radar_1.9.4-0ubuntu4_all.deb. You should see the following output:

# sudo dpkg -i wifi-radar_1.9.4-0ubuntu4_all.deb  Selecting previously deselected package wifi-radar. (Reading database ... 99791 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking wifi-radar (from wifi-radar_1.9.4-0ubuntu4_all.deb) ... Setting up wifi-radar (1.9.4-0ubuntu4) ...

1. If you get any errors at this point, please ensure that you have actually got all the dependencies listed in step 1 installed. Missing dependencies are the most likely cause of errors at this stage.

2. Run the wifi-radar executable as root. It needs to be root to set the wireless settings on the card. The best way to do this is to use sudo or gksudo to run the application. gksudo is a graphical application that brings up a dialog box to allow you to enter your password. You would start Wifi-Radar by assigning the command gksudo wifi-radar to a menu item or launcher.

3. It might be convenient for you to set up sudo not to expect a password when called. This is less secure than the default configuration of sudo which requires a password to be re-entered after a period of time. To configure sudo to not require a password for wifi-radar when called as a user, edit the line of /etc/sudoers that reads

tony     ALL=(ALL) ALL

• to read

tony     ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/wifi-radar

• substituting your username for tony. Editing sudoers in the wrong way might corrupt it.

• When called with the -d option, Wifi-Radar scans the available wireless networks for one that matches a configured profile and connects to it. You can therefore call sudo wifi-radar -d from a launcher to have it connect to any configured wireless network in range.

• How you add icons to your tool bar or desktop panel varies between environments. Under GNOME and XFCE you can right click on the panel and choose to add a “Launcher”. This launcher you can then use to run sudo wifi-radar or gksudo wifi-radar. You can give the launcher the Wifi-Radar logo by selecting /usr/share/pixmaps/wifi-radar.png or /usr/share/pixmaps/wifi-radar.svg as icons.