wlstat – Basic Documentation and Release Notes Note! New features! * Graphical display of link quality on your Kicker bar * Toggle display of status window with single click of applet icon Contents 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Who am I? 1.2 What stage of development is this project at? 1.3 Noted bugs, and unfinished aspects 2.0 Compiling and installing 2.1 Problems after installing 3.0 Contact me 1.0 Introduction Clearly Linux is becoming more and more suitable for the Desktop (whilst retaining its strength as a server OS), and simultaneously there has been a recent massive growth in the use of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Linux drivers for Wireless cards are appearing one by one, and there seems (seemed) to be a need for a user-level application (or applet!) which can quickly show wireless interface information graphically. Since I use KDE - I've chosen to write a Kicker Applet, called wlstat, for just this purpose. 1.1 Who am I? Neil Ferguson - a student currently studying for an MEng in Computer Engineering at Portsmouth University in the UK. I've been interested in Linux for years but have only just got the stage where I can happily say all of my own PCs run Linux (RedHat 9.0 at the moment). I'm very keen to develop my skills as a programmer, and this seems like an ideal way to start. I hope that wlstat becomes a useful applet for many people and would be very pleased to receive useful feedback and any large financial donations ;-) 1.2 What stage of development is this project at? 0.1-unstable was a VERY much alpha release in that most of the features weren't working With 0.2-unstable we're getting there! Most importantly you can see link quality displayed graphically in the applet's icon in your Kicker bar. It updates every two seconds like the rest of the information in the window. 1.3 Noted bugs, and unfinished aspects As yet you can't: * Choose the interface you want to monitor - its eth1 or bust! * Is proc the best place to get some of the information? I think it should be fairly good and fairly quick since we're reading from memory but I'm open to any decent suggestions. * Values for noise/signal levels aren't converted to dBm yet - that'll change soon * Some of the statistics aren't yet available * Configure window needs creating * About window needs creating Bugs - you might have problems if: * You don't have an eth1 for wlstat to monitor * You don't have wireless tools installed, with iwconfig in your path (or in /sbin) * There are two places it seems your wlstat library could be put and you choose the wrong one! 2.0 Compiling and installing ----------------------------- Unpack the tar.gz: # gunzip wlstat-VERSION.tar.gz # tar xf wlstat-VERSION.tar Configure the makefile, compile and install the application: # cd wlstat-VERSION # ./configure && make # su -c "make install" *********************************************************** ** NOTE: use ./configure --prefix=/my/kde/dir if your KDE ** dir isn't /usr/local/kde *********************************************************** 2.1 Problems after installing If the applet doesn't appear on the add-applet menu of the Kicker bar then you've probably installed it to the wrong place. Try reinstalling using the correct location (or copying/moving the .desktop and libwlstat.* files to the right place) If the menu item appears but the applet doesn't, its quite likely that your .desktop file is in the right place but the libwlstat.* files are not. Try and work out where they should be! 3.0 Contact me I'm happy to receive feedback on wlstat from anybody, and I'll try my best to respond to e-mails. If I don't reply, please be assured that I will find time to read your message. E-mail me here: LinuxDev at NetVis.co.uk