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Wifi Assistant

Revision as of 15:23, 9 February 2011

This page is about the application known as Wifi Assistant.

About

What?

This application aims to help make life easier when connecting your Nokia N900 to wifi networks (WLAN) that requires you to visit a captive portal (login) page before you can access the Internet.

Why?

I got tired of not being able to connect easily to networks guarded by a login page, so I created this app to scratch that itch. Nokia doesn't supply this feature and when asked for, it's out of scope for the N900.

How it works and Screenshots

Connected to network

When you're connected to a "new" network, you get this popup which asks you if you want to launch a browser. Simply press Yes or No to open a new browser window. The next time you connect to that network, the same action will be take (open or not open a browser window), unless you untick the "Remember this decision" checkbox. (You'd get the same popup each time instead.)

Wifi Assistant popup

Network Settings

If you fire up the configuration/settings GUI (it's called Wifi Assistant and the icon looks like the one at the top this page) you get a list of all the networks we've used and whether to launch a browser or not. You can change the settings by tapping the line you want to change.

Launch list

Launch settings

Daemon Settings

You can turn the daemon off (kind of) so that it won't show popups. It'll still open a new browser window when you connect to networks where you've selected "Yes" previously.

Daemon settings

Download and Install

The package is available in maemo.org Extras. It can be found under "Networking" in Application Manager, or directly installed from maemo.org Downloads.

Alternative

You could also get the latest version from this projects' garage (home). This is where I put the packages I test myself. It should not differ at all from the ones built by the Maemo build site.

Roadmap

• Daemon that launches browser
• GUI app where you can change settings
• Add and remove settings
• Upload wifi-assistant to Extras, put up a note on maemo.org forum
• Handle SSID/Network names with spaces in them
• Ability to specify URL to launch, per SSID/Network name (add backend support, add GUI for easy configuration)
• Detect if the net is locked down or not (useful for networks which gives you one day access - you only want the browser launched once per day)
• Have the network settings sorted alphabetically
• Daemon work:
  • Let the GUI app launch daemon if it's not running
  • Change listenting to changes in gconf to using dbus (only if this consumes less power)
• Implement Ideas (below)

Bugs

Comes included from the start ...

If you've found a bug I'd love to hear about it and have it fixed so the application improves! There are basically three way in which you can contribute:

• Send me an email (fredrik@wendt.se)
• Put up a post about it on this thread at talk.maemo.org (a forum)
• Enter a bug or feature request in the bug tracking system

Either way - your contribution is greatly appreciated!

Source

It's all written in Python and the source is available for download - you can either get it with

git clone https://vcs.maemo.org/git/wifi-assistant

browse it online.

Contributions are of course very welcome!

License

This application is free to use, inspect, adapt and share, licensed under a BSD type license.

Thanks

To Lisa, Anton and Leia who support me (kind of) while I'm up late etc.

A big thanks to Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) - the build files for this application are extremely similar to those used to build the excellent anti "blue man syndrome" application Hermes.

Donate

You could either simply donate via PayPal, or Flattr this project - either way: thanks for your support!

(if the link doesn't work, please use http://flattr.com/thing/41709/Wifi-Jail-Breakout-Assistant - MediaWiki awkwardness)

If you want me to directly implement a feature you can't live without - contact me and we'll see if I can find the time.

Ideas

Detect login page when connected to new network

This is fairly easy to do - simply make a HTTP HEAD request for a known static resource on the web. If you get anything but a HTTP 200 in return, that network has a captive portal (or the connection was lost etc).

Detect URL needed to autologin

The best idea I have right now is to setup a local proxy. The way to operate this would be to:

• "Open browser and record URLs" button clicked
• a HTTP proxy is setup, the browser is setup to use that proxy
• browser is launched
• user logs in at the portal page
• user switches to Wifi Assistant, clicks "Turn off URL recording"
• proxy is shut down, browser (system) settings reverted to previous settings
• user looks at list of recorded URLs
• user selects URL to use when being connected to this network next time

More Screenshots

These are not really needed to explain how the program works.

Menu

Delete

Launch settings

About