After Christmas, I spent two and a half weeks in Spain with my wife’s family. Having done this many a time, and having taken many different laptops with me, I generally know what I need from a laptop to keep me semi-sane.

One of the best laptops I’d taken in the past was the 12″ PowerBook, and believe me, if Apple made an Intel netbook approaching this small footprint form factor, I’d have one. But alas, that’s a different blog post waiting to happen. However, the 15″ MacBook Pro was a pain in the ass. No desk space to keep it on, unwieldly in size (even fearing warping it when bending over with it in a rucksack) and a battery boasting about 2 hrs, it was a little too much.

In the summer of 2008 I took my Asus EEE 701, running Linux Mint. The little machine was great. Durable, good battery etc, but after a week or so of it being my only computer, the small 7″ screen and cramped keyboard were starting to tell.

This Christmas, I took the Samsung NC10 with OSX installed. I did have a Linux Mint install on a 20GB partition, as a fall back in case I found some weirdness with the OSX86 install, but I’m really happy to report the NC10 was near perfect.

Battery life is incredible. When the battery menu bar indicator turned red, it meant I had over an hour left…whu!? The screen was big enough to play games and watch movies on, and the keyboard, while having one or two keys in odd positions, was really good, no cramping or anything.

Being a long time user of OSX, since the public beta, I know a mac inside out, and feel more at ease than using Linux of any flavour, despite how good Ubuntu/Linux Mint have become. OS X ran sweetly on the NC10, starting up in about 40 seconds and shutting down in less than 5, quicker than my MacBook Pro can wake and sleep, made power management a non-issue.

The only thing still missing is the ability to switch audio output to headphones, but that is very close to being completed apparently… which will make the little NC10 an absolute must for any OSX fans after a netbook.

As you may have well deduced, I’m a mac boy.

I know of the command line, and I’m not scared of it, as such, but I was getting a bit miffed with instructions for getting Kismet running under Linux Mint/Ubuntu.

Essentially, every guide told you how to install Kismet, told you to edit your .conf file and then quite simply “type kismet to start”… as you can imagine, with no immeadiate correct results, I got quite irritated quite quickly!

I did get everything working, including GPS co-ordinates from gpsd and did a quick scan from the patio here in Spain, picking up about 8 networks without moving.

So, I thought about writing a how to guide for other linux noobs who have the same problems. Thing is, it *is* dead simple to get Kismet running, there’s just not much help for you for when things go wrong!

Anyway, running Linux Mint 5 on my Asus EEE, here’s what I did.

Install kismet and gpsd via Synaptic.

Edit the kismet.conf file straight away. It’s located in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
$ sudo pico /etc/kismet/kismet.conf

You need to change the suiduser= to your user name, so mine is suiduser=jake

You most definately need to change the Source for the wifi hardware. Kismet will not run if this is wrong. There’s a list of drivers and names on the Kismet site http://www.kismetwireless.net/documentation.shtml – section 12 Capture Sources.
I’m using a Linksys WUSB54G v4 for scanning, as I plan to add an external antenna using mod. Here’s what I put in to the kismet.conf for the source…
source=rt2500,wlan1,linksys

I also set up another line for my internal Broadcom wifi adapter. I have a Dell mini pci-e fitted from when I installed Tiger on the EEE.
source=bcm43xx,wlan0,broadcom

I swap between the two by adding a # in front of the source I’m not using.

If your card is different, you need to find the right driver from the Kismet list (rt2500 or bcm43xx in my two examples) followed by which interface they will connect via (wlan1 and wlan0). The last bit of information in the source line, the ‘name’ must be present, and as far as I know it can be anything, but if it ain’t there, Kismet isn’t running. I just used the name of each card, in lowercase, linksys and broadcom.

Since I’m using a GPS, I changed that line that asks Do we have a GPS?
gps=true

And the last thing I changed is the output of the log files
logtemplate=/home/jake/Documents/Kismet_scans/%n-%d-%i.%l

If I remember rightly, that’s everything. Now we can fire up the GPS and wifi.

Start the GPS using
$ sudo gpsd -nND4 /dev/ttyUSB0
This gives us a streaming display of the GPS data, so I know it’s running! You can probably remove some of the options, but this worked for me, so I didn’t want to change anything!

Then fire up Kismet with
$ sudo kismet

This should spew out around 10-15 lines in the terminal, then clear everything in that terminal window, paint it black and throw up the wifi info about APs etc within the terminal.

Voila, we are now stumbling. Go and walk/skate/cycle/drive and see what you find. Don’t forget to up your results to wigle.net.

If you can tell me how to do something in this post better, please do, I’m very new to linux. I’ve written this to try and help people who’re like me. Computer literate, but not used to the OS.