While I'm cut off from CVS Ole Laursen has been helping out by applying patches once I've approved them.

Actually I'm beginning to think this might not be such a bad situation for me – it forces people to do more work themselves because they know I can't integrate half-done patches myself.

People are beginning to do API addition patches for gtkmm 2.4, but it's nothing major so far.

I might have found a silly-but-major problem with most of our STL-style widget child interfaces. If so then it can only be fixed in gtkmm 2.4. It's a good thing we have non-STL-style interfaces too.

WLAN

Still without a real internet connection, I've been playing with a WLAN card recently. It's interesting, but not as easy as I had hoped. I found lots of networks with a windows laptop with netstumbler, but I can't seem to connect to any. There's a bunch of 10-euro-per-hour metronet hotspots in Linz, but I couldn't even connect to one of these. I could get an IP address but couldn't do anything more than ping their DNS server.

I found lots of WLANs around the university and I think some of them are open.

I've been trying to set up some wireless sniffer tools on Linux instead, and I think I've finally got kismet working. The following technical bits might be helpful to someone googling in future:

• RedHat 9 has kernel version 2.4.20, so, as mentioned here, you need to specify cisco_cvs instead of cisco as the capture_cardtype in the kismet.conf file.
• And when using cisco_cvs, you need to specify wifiX instead of ethX for the capture_interface. Both seem to exist, but wifiX is used for “raw packet capturing”. Kismet needs to use the ethX interface to enable “monitor mode” for the WLAN card, but unfortunately it just seems to infer the ethX number from the wifiX capture_interface name and they are not necessarily the same. So I had to juggle my network settings a bit so that my WLAN card was on eth0, causing the wifiX to be on wifi0.
• For instance, this is my line in /usr/local/etc/kismet.conf:
  source=cisco_cvs,wifi0,Kismet

• When you su to root to run kismet_monitor, you'll need to add /sbin to your PATH, so it can find /sbin/ifconfig.
• As mentioned here, I had to do a manual /sbin/ifconfig wifi0 up

This cisco card is borrowed. I think I'll get some more standard card for myself.

airsnort now seems to work too, when I specify wifi0, but I don't know how useful it is yet. airfart doesn't seem to work with cisco cards at all.

So now I'll go wandering again and see if I have more success with these new toys.

RedHat 9

RedHat doesn't feel all that different than RedHat 8, but the fancy animated hourglass cursor is surprisingly slick.