Will I lose my dignity? Will you still care?

Back in June of 2009, a bug was opened about a new Kismet release. I was extremely busy, and eventually, I had some time, so I looked in to it, but I couldn’t quite get things working right, so I put it back on the back burner. Fast forward even more, and yngwin saw the bug, and asked me if I had any issues with him dropping the new Kismet (based on Kismet-newcore) in the Gentoo-x86 tree, and since I didn’t respond, he went ahead and did so. And I am glad he did, because it reminded me that I wanted to get back to it. (I did actually fix a minor issue that the setuid bit was getting reset so it wasn’t getting installed properly, still also need to look into the plugins)

As some people have read, I got an Efika MX OpenClient from Genesi, and I’ve had a chance to work with it quite a bit. One of the things that I wanted to play with was Kismet on it, as I think the Efika MX Smartbook would make an excellent platform for wardriving (amongst many other things), being compact, lightweight, and having gps and wireless built in, with a very long battery life.

So, I gave it a shot, and it most definitely works (I’ve keyworded Kismet ~arm for the 2010.01.1 release) using the latest kernel (2.6.31.12.3-ER1) as of this writing, as well as the latest firmware for the wireless card from Ralink ( USB Firmware 22 released 03/31/2010. This is with the mac80211-based rt2800usb driver, NOT the rt3070sta driver from staging.

There is definitely a lot of potential in these little machines, and I really wish I had the means to buy more of them, just so that I had a few around to play with different things rather than having the one and swapping out the sdcard (assuming I’m not doing it on the pata ssd drive in the device.) I am really looking forward to when the smartbook gets released.