Wifi in Haiku

Expected supported hardware

All of FreeBSD 8 wlan drivers should be working. Any PCMCIA, CardBus, ExpressCard, USB or ISA based cards will not work. Only PCI, miniPCI, PCI-Express, miniPci-Express and PCI-X are supposed to work.
This includes:

• aironetwifi supporting at least
  Cisco Aironet 350 Series
  Aironet PCI4500
  Aironet PCI4800
  

• atheroswifi supporting almost every chipset outthere (though no AR9285 chips)

• broadcom43xx supporting
  BCM4301, BCM4306, BCM4307, BCM4309, BCM4311, BCM4312 and BCM4318

• iprowifi2100 supporting the 2100 chips

• iprowifi2200 supporting
  2200BG
  2225BG
  2915ABG

• iprowifi3945 supporting the 3945 chips

• iprowifi4965 supporting the 4965 chips

• marvell88w8335 supporting
  Marvell Libertas 88W8310
  Marvell Libertas 88W8335

• marvell88w8363 supporting the 88W8363 chips

• ralinkwifi supporting
  RT2560
  RT2561S
  RT2561
  RT2661

• wavelanwifi supporting at least
  3Com Airconnect
  GLPRISM2 WaveLAN
  Intersil Prism3
  Intersil Prism2.5
  Linksys WDT11
  Netgear MA301
  PRISM2STA WaveLAN
  Siemens SpeedStream
  SMC 2602W
  Us Robotics 2415
  Addtron AWA-100 PCI

WEP encryption

WEP encryption is available through a command-line application setwep. It is a temporary means for joining an unencrypted or WEP encrypted wifi network. setwep works with 64- and 128-bit WEP and supports both text keys as well as hex digit keys (see WEP notes below).

The usage is: setwep device_path [ssid] [key]

Below are two examples. Let us assume your wifi network card is "/dev/net/iprowifi3945/0" and the wireless network is named "haikuwifi".

Example 1: Connect with 64-bit WEP encryption using a hex digit key

setwep /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 haikuwifi 0x3456789abc

Example 2: Connect to an unencrypted wireless network

setwep /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 haikuwifi

WEP notes

• 64-bit WEP uses a 40-bit key, which means 5 text characters or 10 hex digits
• 128-bit WEP uses a 104-bit key, which means 13 text characters or 26 hex digits
• hexadecimal digits = characters 0-9 and A through F (prepended with "0x" in setwep)

WPA encryption

At the moment there is no WPA encryption available in Haiku. However, there is some preliminary and unfinished code for implementing WPA available. Some tasks for improving this is to plug it into the wpa_supplicant build process and then fixing compile & runtime issues.

install-wifi-firmwares.sh

To install the firmware for Intel ipw2100, Intel ipw2200/2225/2915, Broadcom 43xx & Marvell 88W8335, you need to run

install-wifi-firmwares.sh

The Intel ipw2100 and ipw22xx will install without an internet connection, as the licensing terms allow Haiku to distribute the original firmware archives. However, they do require acknowledgment by the end-user prior to their installation. The Broadcom 43xx and Marvell 88W8335 will require an active internet connection, as the files containing their respective firmwares cannot be distributed with Haiku.

People building their own Haiku image can modify their build/jam/UserBuildConfig accordingly. Details for that and general updates on the wifi topic are found at the online version of this document.

If you have to download the firmware, but don't have a working internet connection under Haiku, the online version offers a shell script, which will create a zip file for you to extract to Haiku's /boot. After that you'll have all files needed by install-wifi-firmwares.sh.