Netwalker Questions

[Wildherb]

Thanks, first of all, to those of you lucky enough to have netwalkers already for sharing your opinions and experiences. Much as I would love one of these devices myself, before I part with my cash I'd like to ask a few questions. Sorry if some of them are of minority interest but they are important to me ;o)

1) Does the wireless suppoty promiscuous mode? In other words, if you run tcpdump can you see UNIcast packets from other devices on the WLAN (not just your own traffic and multicasts from others)

2) Has anybody tried aircrack? Does the wireless go into monitor mode and does the kernel support packet injection?

3) Does it come with Python installed? if so, what version?

4) Does it come with PERL? If so, is it possible to install modules directly from CPAN, i.e. perl -MCPAN -e 'install My::Module'

5) Do java applications run OK? what is performance like?

6) How easy is it to zoom in or change the font sizes? For such a small screen I trust that the designers are not expecting 20-20 vision as a pre-requisite for ownership!

7) How good is Youtube performance?

Many thanks in advance for anybody who can answer any of these.

[merlin1]

Ok, I'll try to answer some

1) No idea...

2) No idea...

3) Python 2.6.2 is installed.

4) PERL 5.10 is installed. Didn't test CPAN access.

5) No Java is installed. Seems it's not a painless job to install either.

6) Do you refer to the web browser or the entire system? Firefox allows to change font sizes and zoom in and out of course and you can also the font family/size used by the entire system in GNOME's Appearance panel easily. You can also alter the DPI setting if desired.

7) Some clips I tried wouldn't play, displayed an icon that makes me think they require Flash 9; another one worked. I wasn't able to go into fullscreen mode and overall, playback was slightly choppy, sound was fine though. I have to check with other videos though as this is odd. My iPhone 3G played that clip flawlessly with considerably less CPU power. CPU usage varied between 75 and 100 percent during playback. htop showed firefox35-bin used 50-55% of the CPU, pulseaudio took 12-15%. Not sure what makes up the rest. Needless to say that launching other apps, even just Gnome-Terminal, during YouTube video playback caused it to get very choppy and the sound to temporarily fail. This is somewhat of a bummer considering the main reason I bothered to install Flash on the Netwalker was YouTube, hoping I could watch HQ videos in full-screen. I guess my iPhone still remains YouTube viewer #1 for me. I don't think the choppiness is due to missing CPU power, it's probably a software problem. I haven't tried "conventional" video playback on the device but the Pocketables review said a 480p video played flawlessly, don't know what codec it used though.

HTH!

Merlin1 ---from his dark and deep cave

[speculatrix]

can you try installing kismet, it's pretty easy to build (--prefix=/usr/local/kismet) if needed to see whether it can use the wireless card in monitor mode?

thanks!

[Wildherb]

Just a quick mention that I decided not to get a Netwalker. Instead I've bought a Nokia N900. It is not quite a direct competitor but both can be seen a Z replacements. Reasons for my choice:

1 One device to rule them all - fed up of separate phone, sat-nav, and PDA. Or, should I say, fed up of having to justify them all to my wife!
2 inbuilt 3G
3 Slight change in personal circumstances
4 I've had a play with the Nokia N810 and the format is quite usable. The N810 has a slightly larger screen than the N900 and given the choice, I'd prefer the larger screen, but hey! you cant have everyting.
5 Promise from the Backtrack Linux team to produce a mobile edition for the N900. Mobile pen-testing has been one of my original objectives with the Z, and it has been pretty good at it but difficult to get a build that was also a good PDA (e.g. OpenBSD)

Thanks to all of you for your comments, I will pop back from time to time to see how you are all getting on.

Regards,

Wildherb