Welcome

Wifi in Haiku

index 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:

index Connecting to a wireless network

Besides of course unencrypted networks, Haiku has preliminary support for accessing wireless networks via WEP encryption keys. WEP is an early encryption method, although not the most secure.

You can list available networks, join and leave them with the command ifconfig from Terminal:

ifconfig [wifi_device_path] [list|join|leave] (key)

You can find your wifi_device_path in the Network preferences applet, or by executing ifconfig -a.

Below are a few examples of connecting to a wireless network named wifitopia. For these examples we are assuming your wifi network card is /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0.

Listing wireless networks:

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 list

Joining unsecured wireless network:

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 join wifitopia

Joining WEP secured wireless network: (ascii password)

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 join wifitopia mypassword

Joining WEP secured wireless network: (64-bit hex password)

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 join wifitopia 0x4010FABEEF

Leaving a wireless network:

ifconfig /dev/net/iprowifi3945/0 leave wifitopia

index Automatically connecting to a wireless network

To make your system connect to a given SSID at each boot automatically, you can specify your wireless networks and passwords in /boot/common/settings/network/wireless_networks with the following format:

network wifitopia {
   password mypassword
}

If you don't create this configuration file, the system will connect to the first unencrypted network it finds.

WEP notes

index WPA encryption

At the moment there is no WPA encryption available in Haiku, though there have been some efforts bringing it significantly closer.

index install-wifi-firmwares.sh

To install the firmware for Intel ipw2100, Intel iprowifi2200/2225/2915, Broadcom 43xx & Marvell 88W8335, you need to run

install-wifi-firmwares.sh

The Intel ipw2100 and iprowifi22xx 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.

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