JLime Linux - WiFi Scanning, New Userland, etc...

Almost all of the problems I was initially having with jlime were due to the fact that when I downloaded it, they were in the middle of a big update with an experimental kernel and an old base userland image. After pulling down the new userland and going to a known-stable kernel, everything seems to be rockin' and rollin' with jLime on my Hewlett Packard Jornada 720.

Case and point, X now has a decent interface, desktop icons, and Torsmo status monitor works great (finally!)


I was also having problems with package management. Those were also resolved by installing fresh from the current userland image. The packages are also pretty up-to-date with a quite extensive list of things to choose from. Want nmap? MySQL? OpenSSH? No problem! Kismet for War-driving? Just say the word! Here's my J720 running Kismet with a Senao Engenius 200mW Long-range 802.11b card attached to a pair of 19dBi omni-directional magnet mount antennae.



And a close-up of the screen:


All this, and my battery lasts for hours upon hours, even with the wireless card installed. I actually have nothing left to complain about at all aside from the fact that 32MB of RAM and 206 MHz is still a somewhat anemic machine for web browsing. For light-weight stuff like checking e-mail, managing servers via SSH and the like, this seems to be just about the most handy thing I've seen in a very long time.

I'm working on getting a data cable for my new GPS so that I can really put this thing to the test when it comes to war-driving. I haven't ever used kismet for serious network location. I'm more of a Mac OS X and BSD guy at heart, so KisMAC and BSD-Airtools are my typical weapons of choice.

It's simply amazing to me, though, to see this kind of development happening for a family of portable computers that's been more or less dead for the better part of a decade. Where I was once drooling over the OLPC and EEePC, I'm now finding that I have all of the ultra-mobile goodness I really need right here in a package that's admittedly slower but also lighter, smaller and longer lasting.