Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry)?

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Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry)?

Postby cloph » Fri Sep 12, 2014 12:25 pm

Hi *,

I wondered why the (raspberry) installation image doesn't come with the necessary software packages to hook it up to a wireless network.
Kind of a bummer to have to crawl under the desk or even find a cable and dragging over a monitor :-)

My rationale for having it as part of the installation image:
  • Raspberry is often sold in bundles that include wifi dongle, but no ethernet cable
  • WIth the fast wireless routers nowadays, fewer and fewer people go through the hassle of installing network cables to hook up their destktop systems
  • often enough there is no desktop computer anymore, bur rather just dual-use laptops
So often enough the router is in inconvenient to reach places - or to be more exact: While it is easy to bring the rasberry and a cable in reach - getting also the monitor over to be able to type in whatever is needed to configure/update the system is a much harder.
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Re: Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry

Postby moonman » Fri Sep 12, 2014 4:33 pm

Plug it in wherever you want and ssh in. Sah daemon is running by default
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Re: Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry

Postby cloph » Sun Sep 21, 2014 9:36 pm

So to make it an answer to my question:

ArchLinux users are expected
* to have a device with ethernet
* to have physical access to their router
* to use dhcp with the router
* either have access to the router's control panel or the knowledge/tools to find out what IP is assigned to the device by other means
* have another device to do the above and that can be used to connect via ssh

Fine, reasonable to some degree. That explains why devs think that's not strictly needed to have wifi support out of the box.

But are there reasons against adding the wpa_supplicant (& crda/dependencies) packages?
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Re: Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry

Postby moonman » Mon Sep 22, 2014 2:33 am

Arch is barebone by default. Only the most necessary packages are shipped to boot the device. Users are expected to build upon that with the packages they need/want. You could download all necessary packages by hand and transfer them over to raspberry to be installed.
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Re: Rationale of not shipping with wpa_supplicant (raspberry

Postby calzon65 » Wed Sep 24, 2014 11:27 pm

Cloph, as a user of ALARM for a few years, I too was initially a bit surprised as to the “bare metal” approach of an Arch release. Over time I have come to really appreciate the fact that an initial Arch installation won’t be loaded up with a bunch of software I will probably never use, slow down my system or waste disk space.

Sure some folks may say, just uninstall the software you don’t need or don’t want, I rather say, just install the software you need or want. True is puts a bit more responsibility on us users to understand the requirements for our particular hardware platform, but I have come to really love the “purity” of an Arch install.
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