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Monday, April 2, 2007

Avahi, wi-fi and why I Love Feisty Fawn

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn makes WiFi fun in Linux. Switching WiFi networks for me in Edgy with my Dell 1501 was chore, I loathed it. Today I spent the day driving around Chicago hopping from on wi-fi network to another. Clicked my WiFi icon, saw what networks were available and connected. No restarting, no logging off, no terminal commands. It just worked.

Feisty includes Avahi, it is a free Zeroconf implementation, including a system for multicast DNS/DNS-SD service discovery. It allows programs to publish and discover services and hosts running on a local network with no specific configuration. For example you can plug into a network and instantly find printers to print to, files to look at and people to talk to.

In Feisty Avahi works like this, you set you connection to roaming, left click the WiFi icon, a list pulls up with available networks including security and signal strength, and then you select your network.

This features ensure I'll never use edgy eft on a laptop again.
edited by pHreaksYcle

5 comments:

Unknown said...
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Alex said...

i used wifiradar for a while, and it sounds like this is just a more robust program...the DNS discover thing is something that we really needed for non DHCP servers. I had to get a script to get my DNS numbers when I connect to my colleges school network with PPTP....as soon as I get a chance, ill be upgrading to Fiesty

JC said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Diabolic Preacher said...

i read somewhere that feisty fawn will be released on 19th april or something.

my blog

rollerskatejamms said...

That has nothing to do with avahi. That's ubuntu's new modification to the network-manager applet. It just uses regular old dhcp.

Avahi is for connecting to a network with no dhcp, without having to configure anything. However, all you get is basic networking between PCs, no internet access.