Hi

Has anyone tried this?

Devicescape

Does it work with UK WiFi network providers? BT or t-mobile?

Cheers
Rich

Can it be true that none of us has tried this? I guess I'll register and give it a go. I'll tell you all whether it's worth it for the 770. From what I hear the N800 pretty much does this on its own.

I installed it last night on my N800 and it seemed to work as advertised at least with my home FON router. Here's a quick blog about it:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/wifi_autol...vicescape.html

According to the Devicescape web site it's currently US/Canada/Japan centric (with the exception of FON) with very limited support in the UK (only The Cloud http://www.thecloud.net ) and the UK support is "experimental" so may or may not even work.

I looked at Devicescape previously and it occured to me that it's probably missed the boat in the UK. With unlimited 3G mobile phone internet connections costing as little as £12.50/month in the UK with national coverage it really doesn't seem cost beneficial paying for limited hotspot coverage. The only situation where I see a hotspot account being cost effective is where you regularly travel worldwide to hotels with hotspots by the same network provider.

The Cloud will charge £12/month but if you find yourself in a location which has a competitors hotspot you'll need to sign up for a second account, or go without. A 3G connection will be available pretty much everywhere in the UK and will fall back to GSM/GPRS if reception is patchy. A fixed rate unlimited 3G data tarrif such as that offered by T-Mobile Web'n'Walk renders hotspots pretty much irrelevant nowadays.

If/when Devicescape deliver on their promise to allow customers to join *any* available hotspot and pay the pay-as-you go rate, then Devicescape may be onto something interesting and this could drive hotspot usage in what is essentially a fractured, overpriced and incompatible market.

FON hotspots are becoming ubiquitous in Helsinki, and so autoconnection with them is already quite useful for me. I also like the Sonera HomeRun support since that is part of my company 3G data plan.

What Devicescape does is not really open the "closed" WiFi networks, but instead just makes their usage a lot nicer with the N800. Now I can configure my device to automatically connect with HomeRun and FON hotspots and don't have to worry about a manual web-based login step.

There are also some "free" networks in Helsinki that require web-based login. For example, City of Helsinki WiFi hotspots are free for anybody but require you to accept their security policies via a web form every time you connect. If Devicescape handled this then my N800 would be automatically online via various WiFi networks almost all the time while I'm in central Helsinki. Since I don't have fixed-rated 3G this would be very nice.

Good points, Mil. I'm glad to see that at least one company is working on this though!

This would have been really simple to implement if the networking in the tablet had been done through the standard Debian /etc/network/interfaces method: Just add a post-up script in the interfaces file, let it check which network it is, and if it's one of those mentioned in the quote above then run a curl command to provide the necessary info.

Unfortunately the networking isn't done this way in the tablet. But if there's a hook somewhere it could still be done, if anyone knows where the hook is..

You can do this even more easily on the N800. The "Internet Connection Daemon" raises proper DBUS signals on all network state changes that any program can subscribe to. For example, see the MaemoPlazer DBUS watcher code.

If somebody wants to make a free software autologin applet for the Maemo platform, the one for GNOME might be a good starting point. We may still end up doing this with MaemoPlazer later, but for now I'll stick with Devicescape as it seems to work acceptably well.

I wouldn't say "more easily".. it's very difficult to beat the simplicity of the Debian networking setup. But I'm downloading from the links you provided to have a better look at it (although I don't speak Python however)

To clarify this a bit, DBUS implementation in the Internet Connectivity Daemon means that any application can start listening to the signals emitted by it. So no need to watch for file changes or whatever, just tell DBUS you're interested to know when there is a new connection.