[maemo-users] WifiInfo

[From: Tim Teulings]

Hello! 

> A few questions:

> On the scan for networks tab there is a checkbox to enable scanning. Why? 
> Is that to conserve resources when the application is minimized? Does it 
> continue scanning even when that tab isn't active?

It seems like there polling of the OS daemon can crash the daemon (no 
connection possible anymore), requiring a reboot (see desciption on the 
download page!), so it must be explicitely activated. Polling also drains 
the battery, should another reason to not activate it by default. WifiInfo 
currently does not stop if the screen blanker kicks in (but its is on my 
list of planed improvements). However for wardriving this should be 
configurable :-) 

Note that WifiInfo uses a undocumented OS interface (DBus interface to the 
wlan handling daemon). However using this interface is the only way to get 
the list. Directly polling the kernel requires root access and interacts 
with the OS daemon in a way that it gets is faster and more definitely nuts 
(this is likely also the reason why there is no clean port of kismet and 
other tools. AFAIK you would have to stop and restart after use the network 
handling stuff of the OS). The poll interval for the scna list is hard wired 
for this reason since reducing the poll interval would increase the crash 
likelyness. 

It would be nice if fremantle would contain a documented interface for this. 
If not, it would be nice if the current interface is at least kept ;-) 

> On the main tab there is a slider to select poll frequency. Does that 
> affect the network scanning, or just the update of information on the 
> current network?

This only affects the polling of the current network connection. In the next 
version the slider will move into a configuration dialog (under fremantle 
slider are bigger and there is not enough space for it on the tab rider). 

-- 
Gruß...
      Tim.