Allow wifix to be run manually without an internet connection

Registered by Mitch Towner

Generally: Add wifix capability to function without an internet connection. Currently Wifix presents a 'catch 22' situation where you need to have a functioning Internet connection to solve the problem of not having a working wireless connection.

The idea is to be able run Wifix in 'offline' or 'manual' mode so that for example one Wifix bundle could be download on another machine and then transfer via a flash drive. This can then be run on a computer that does not have internet access.

For this manual or 'offline mode' to work, we may need to implement a command line argument (such as 'wifix --offline') & ensure that we allow pointing to this manually downloaded driver file.

Stage One:
The simplest start on this long-term goal is to include a search-able index (i.e. an html file and/or website) where the end user can search for their device ID which will be matched against our database & will display the URL for the driver that is required.

In this scenario, the end user will need to discover their device ID (by running lspci or lsusb & 'grepping' for 'Network') & manually search the index with their device ID. This device ID will match a list of known drivers & display a URL where the current driver for that device can be downloaded. The end user will then need to manually download this driver from the given URL and then wifix would handle rest of the installation functions.

At Stage One since we have an SQL database to work with on the server now we can consider the (simpler) migration of using an embedded SQLite database on the client to hold all the pertinent device and driver information and the location in the bundle or on-line of the required driver.

Stage Two
Later we could explore the idea of including all major dependencies (such as ndiswrapper) & some of the most common 'free' drivers & non-free drivers (as permitted by law) incorporated into the wifix bundle. We'll have to take into account that ndiswrapper is already packaged separately in many distributions.

At Stage Two (having everything packaged together) the Wifix customer can copy Wifix from a usb flash drive onto their computer. They can then install and run Wifix and Wifix will install the required network drivers that are already incorporated in the Wifix bundle.

  Later we might consider moving to using CouchDB for this purpose so that we can take advantage of its ability to easily replicate data from the desktop to the on-line and keep the clients and the servers in sync and up to date.

Blueprint information

Status:
Not started
Approver:
Wifixers
Priority:
Medium
Drafter:
None
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
None
Definition:
Discussion
Series goal:
None
Implementation:
Unknown
Milestone target:
milestone icon ver0.5

Related branches

Sprints

Whiteboard

+ The html page that displays every driver and its download page: Done
See http://wifix.sourceforge.net/drivers/
It would be nice that when running offline, wifix would automatically tell you which driver to look for in the page and possibly prompt you for the downloaded file/
- To begin with this html page needs to be included in the Wifix bundle.

(?)

Work Items

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