# Touchpad connecting on AdHoc Wifi network



## corona (Sep 4, 2011)

Ok all, this is my first post and I'm brand new to this Linux thing, so here I go.

I just got the Touchpad and I like it. But I NEED it to connect to a HD2 Wifi hotspot, only available as AdHoc, no Managed Wifi option.

According to this post in PreCentral here (http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Ad-Hoc_Networking) you should be able to make an ad-hoc wifi connection by doing so from the command line in a terminal shell. However, it says that it's not going to work for long, since the WiFi manager forces the device back into Managed mode periodically. In order to avoid this, you need to turn off the WiFi functionality through the webOS GUI. Then, bring the WiFi card up using: /usr/sbin/wifidriver -i

Since this little guide was originally written for the Pre and not the TP, I guess it's not surprising that there is no /usr/sbin/wifidriver command. Doing a little research leads me to using modprobe to bring up the driver and lsmod tells me the driver for the wifi is named ar6000. Reading the man pages about modprobe says that -i tells it to ignore install and remove commands from the modprobe.conf file on the TP. Seeing as this doesn't seem to be related to preventing Wifi Manager from reverting any wifi connections to Managed mode, I'm thinking I need another way of preventing this from happening. *Any ideas on this regard would be much appreciated.* But there's more..

Using Xecutah, XServer & XTerm with WebOS 3.0.2, I have found that I can use the iwconfig command to set up a wifi connection and that I can set a number of parameters like mode, essid, power etc, but key/enc and commit are two parameters that are not accepted. Every time I try to set them I get an error. So I have no way of setting a WEP key in either AdHoc or Managed mode. *Any ideas on this problem would also be appreciated.*

However, using an open AdHoc network without a key I HAVE been able to use modprobe to bring up the wifi driver, then use iwconfig to connect to the AdHoc network, then use dhclient to get an IP address and am able to ping yahoo.com and use the internet in a browser..... but only for about 10 seconds before the connection is mysteriously lost. I think the Wifi Manager is kicking in and reverting the wifi connection back to Managed. Which sends us back to the original problem. Anyway, considering I've never used Linux before, I'm running up against a wall as far as my brain can process things, so any ideas from you dear readers would be much appreciated. I know we are close to getting this working, I think we just need one or two more things to achieve success!

Here are the commands I used from the terminal to get a (very short) connection via AdHoc:
I turned off Wifi from the drop down menu in the clock in WebOS GUI. Then at the XTerm terminal I typed:
modprobe ar6000
ifconfig eth0 up
iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc essid "MyAdHocNetwork" power off
dhclient eth0
ping -c 4 www.yahoo.com

The last line of course is just to show that the network really is connected and working. Any "MyAdHocNetwork" of course should be the name of whatever your adhoc network is called.


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## BrentBlend (Jun 11, 2011)

are you using kde/xde
What distro are you doing this on?


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## corona (Sep 4, 2011)

good question, this was all done in webOS using xecutah. I guess that makes this 2.6.35-palm-tenderloin??

is kde/xde a variant of Linux like OpenSUSE and RedHat?


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## BrentBlend (Jun 11, 2011)

it's just an environment like gnome from ubuntu (what most people know)
I'll look into this more though, I won't recieve my touchpad for about a week so bear with me!


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## corona (Sep 4, 2011)

No problem, I'm glad at least one person might have time for this. I know in comparison with porting Android over this is not a big issue and once Android is ported this issue will go away for anyone porting over as Android won't have the same restriction of not connecting to Ad-Hoc Wifi as WebOS does. But I do know some people are going to want to keep WebOS so I still think this is a valid issue to try and figure out. 
Anyone know if there is a Wifi Manager service that is running in the background that I can disable from a command line and then just start up the wifi driver independently and start an adhoc connection that way? Does anyone even know for sure if the Wifi Manager is what keeps reverting all wifi connections to Managed connections?


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## asif9t9 (Oct 22, 2011)

I have CM7 loaded on my Touchpad now and I still can't connect to an ad-hoc network. I always though Android could do it if it was rooted, but all it can actually do is allow your phone to create an ad-hoc network for like your laptop to connect to. There is still no easy option to connect the Touchpad.

Funny enough, I loaded some WebOS patch for ad-hoc networks, and it worked, for a bit. So WebOS wins this time.


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