Friday, March 8, 2013

Mobile hotspot connection on Linux

Hi,

I always wanted to write a short blog post about connecting to a mobile hotspot like joikuspot on my N9 phone. The application uses ad-hoc mode, but it can be easily adapted to managed mode like on the Blackberry DevAlpha, Z10 and Q10 devices. Just replace the "ad-hoc" mode with "managed". Unfortunately, joikuspot does not support wpa and wpa2, so this command will be primarily useful for wep. If you leave the key option out, it is also useful for open (i.e. brief sanity checks, et cetera).

Here you can find a reference command which works fine across distributions and even without GUI:

iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc essid Test key s:TestTestTests && dhclient wlan0

It is admittedly not a big thing. However, I lost this command several times in the past. Now, I would know what to do by heart, but what about this in half a year or later? :)

Also, netcfg and similar distribution specific utils kept being broken for some reason. This was always the fallback for me which worked off-hand. Hope it helps. :-)