Haiku Gets WEP/WPA/WPA2 Support

[XDelusion]

Oh gosh, finally news that's got nothing to do with patents or smartphones or the comparing of male sexual organs. Haiku news! Michael Lotz has added preliminary support for WPA to Haiku, taking the first steps towards making the Haiku wireless stack a lot more useful.

Recently, Micheal Lotz, long-time Haiku hacker, started a long-term contract coding for Haiku exclusively, which is, as it turns out, already paying dividends. Having support for WEP/WPA/WPA2 in Haiku is a major boon for those of us with secured wireless networks, an while it's still all in the testing stages at the moment, it's still a major step.

As the comment to revision 42775 states:

Add the wpa_supplicant optional package. It should be stable and is working on the limited set of hardware I could test it with. By installing the wpa_supplicant one can now join WEP/WPA/WPA2 networks by either selecting them in the network prefs/network status applet or using ifconfig [interface] join [network name] [password]. The wpa_supplicant opens a dialog asking for more details if it can't connect with the given information. Note that there is no way to automatically store that extra info right now, so it has to be provided on each join. The configuration can however be stored manually into the /boot/common/settings/network/wireless_networks config file.

This should work on all wireless chipsets Haiku has drivers for (quite a few through the support for FreeBSD drivers), but Lotz obviously couldn't test it on all of them since he doesn't own all those chipsets himself. As such, testers are needed to further identify which chips work, and where potential problems lie.


From:  http://www.osnews.com/story/25215/Haiku_Gets_WEP_WPA_WPA2_Support

[XDelusion]

Haiku is still in Alpha stage...


With that in mind, it is quite advanced for what it is. The Haiku team is trying to make sure that everything is stable and feature rich, as in WILL APPEAL TO THE COMMON USER, before they bother making a 1.0 release. They've still got a way to go, but considering the short life span of the project, it has advanced leaps and bounds, but alas...

Alphas are not something that you want to use as your ALT OS. Time will prove Haiku to be the best.

Im a bit of an OS enthusiast, and check out pretty much everything to some degree or another, but I must admit to being seriously underwhelmed by Haiku. I honestly think all 3 "NG" amiga based oses are more impressive. I dont say this as an amiga fan either, but rather from the position of someone who's simply interested in OSes. On paper it (Haiku) has an ok feature set, but in practice many of those features are the parallel of a paper release. None of the NG amiga OSes have MP for example, yet all 3 are at least as stable as Haiku.

To me it appears Haiku has only gotten the attention it received due to Google summer of code giving it publicity, not on the strength of the OS itself. This isnt to say I dislike it as such, but it's not something Id try to use as a productive system, it's simply too immature.

[XDelusion]

10 Years ain't that long, especially when you are not backed by money from people in high places.

Just look at how long it took Linux to become somewhat useable to the common user...

Short life span?  hey've been working on it for over a decade!



I've seen release OSs that are less stable!

I had it on a netbook a couple of years back and it was fairly stable and very quick given the low end hardware it was on.  I know some of the developers were using it as desktops even and I'd imagine it's improved since then.

[XDelusion]

Now now, don't take my humour as a slam towards AROS' progress.

I like AROS and use it from time to time, and am glad as glad can be that it has made so many great strides as of late. Without such progress I'd still be looking at it as a project that has been doomed since the beginning, but recent progress has certainly changed my mind about a great many things.

I just have to boast about MorphOS and how advanced it has become because hardly anyone else does. No one takes the time I don't think, to fully explore what is under the hood like they used to do with Work Bench back in the day.

Anyhow, Haiku is still alpha, so considering that it is an alpha release, when the 1.0 comes out, it should be VERY stable and rich with features for use (on the right hardware), where as many OS's (Linux included) still felt like an alpha release even when they had reached version 6.x or what ever.
I think the Haiku team is doing things the right way and approaching it all with a very professional and serious mind, which is good because I don't want to be using a hack upon a hack upon a hack anyway.

[XDelusion]

Two of my favorite OS' at odds with each other.

[XDelusion]

We'll never see a 680x0 port. It began as a PPC OS anyhow, but yes it was being considered as the future of Amiga around the same time that QNX was and MorphOS was born.

[XDelusion]

Haiku started life as an x86 only OS, since then it's been partially ported to ARM, PPC and 68k.

Of course, I was referring to BeOS which Haiku is based upon. BeOS ended up going x86 to appeal to a larger market. They had a deal to be shipped as an alternative start up option sitting next to windows on the computers that Dell, Compaq, HP, Toshiba, and the like were selling. Microsoft caught wind of this, and reminded these companies of the fine print on their contract and the rest is history...

I'm sure you all know the story.

[XDelusion]

IIRC In the gateway era BeOS was touted as a possible new OS for Amiga after the QSSL deal fell through but before Linux was named.

Yes!

And this was before the advent of the tramp stamp...

boy I miss those days.