One of my favourite dishes (my wife loves it too) is biryani. So, when I had to make up a meal for this weekend, I decided I would do a biryani again. Being too lazy to get up and search for the book, I used Google to find some inspiration. And the first hit was an interesting variation to the Pakistani version I cooked so often. No eggs, no tomatoes, no raisins.

It’s Hyderabadi Biryani. And since I work together on a daily basis with a team  at IBM in Hyderabad, I thought it would be nice to try this one out so we have something else to talk about than work-related issues…

I made some alterations to the original recipe, mostly caused by the (un)availability of ingredients at the local shop.

Picture copied from http://www.indobase.com/

The recipe is not difficult at all. I think you can not fail to produce something that you’ll like! Preparing the marinade takes a bit of time, then you can turn your attention to other things for at least two hours while the meat is marinating. The actual cooking takes 20 minutes.

The moment all the ingredients went into the cooking pot, my wife commented that the aromas were heavenly! She walked over a couple of times to lift the lid and enjoy the scent of the boiling goodness.

The resulting dish is an aromatic and rich comfort food. You will keep eating until your belly protests.

Ingredients (4 persons):

• 300 g Basmati Rice (semi-cooked / parboiled)
• 300 g chicken breast, chopped into small pieces
• 20 g ghee
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 cm ginger stem
• 1 onion, sliced
• 200 g lemon curd
• 2 green chillis (I admit… I forgot to add those)
• juice from 1 lime
• 1 tsp red chilli powder
• a pinch of caraway seeds
• 2 twigs of coriander leaves, chopped
• 2 twigs mint leaves, chopped
• a pinch of saffron
• generous amount of cinnamon powder
• 2 cardamom pods or equivalent cardamom powder
• 1 drop of saffron color (or use turmeric powder instead)
• 1 clove
• vegetable oil
• salt to taste

Preparation:

Make the ghee yourself if you do not have it ready:

• Melt 100 g of butter (you will not use all of it in the biryani, so you can store some of it for later). Keep the heat low, do not let the butter turn brown!
• Let the watery component of the butter boil away for some 10 to 20 minutes.
• From time to time use a spoon to remove the foamy substance which forms on the surface.
• When no new foam is forming on the surface, the ghee is ready. It will have a golden colour.
• We need to get rid of the brown residue on the bottom of the pan. Pour the ghee through a clot or simply use a tea restrainer or other finely meshed sieve. You can store the ghee in the fridge if you prepare this long before the actual meal.

Marinade part one:

• Grind the garlic and the ginger. Mix this thoroughly through the chopped meat.
• Put the marinade in the fridge for an hour.
• In the meanwhile, fry the sliced onions in a heated pan on low heat untill they turn light brown.
• Let the onions cool down and crush them (or chop them into fine pieces).

Marinade part two:

• After at least one hour, retrieve the marinating meat.
• Add the fried onion, lemon curd, lime juice, red chilli powder, green chilli paste, cinnamon, cardamom, caraway seeds, clove, coriander leaves, mint leaves and salt to the marinated meat.
• Mix thoroughly and place the meat back into the fridge for at least 1 hour.

The finish:

• Drop the saffron in some water to extract its color and aroma. Or if you do not have saffron, use plenty of turmeric in the next step.
• Boil 1/2 liter of water. Add salt to taste, cinnamon, cardamom, and the saffron water.
• Use an iron cooking pot with thick bottom to prevent the rice from burning. Heat a bit of vegetable oil in the pan.
• Add half the rice and fry for a few minutes. Keep the heat low.
• Pour the ghee over the rice.
• Spread the marinated meat on top, and again spread the remaining semi-cooked rice over the meat.
• Gently pour the boiling water in a circular motion over the rice layer.
• Keep boiling on a low flame for exactly 15 minutes.
• Ready! The water should have been absorbed by the rice.

Ideally this biryani is served with some Indian cooked vegetables… but I thought of my son and served broccoli instead.

Enjoy your meal!

Eric

Let me tell you some about what I have been doing in the past days. Thinking about the future of course – not much of that will interest you. More to the point, I have been thinking what needs to be done for Slackware to gain a little more ground.

There has not been a lot of movement in slackware-current for the past months and while that is pretty frustrating, we will have to respect Patrick Volkerding for giving his personal life a bit more priority now. In the meantime, I will keep myself busy with some of the “subsystems” in Slackware – KDE 4.8 is around the corner and I will certainly build packages for that.

There is also the urgent issue of dealing with JDK and JRE. As you may remember, Oracle decided that new binary releases of its own Java SE (the runtime or JRE as well as the SDK) may no longer be included with Linux distros. They retired the “Operating System Distributor License for Java” (DLJ) and decided that distros should compile their own packages using the Open Source codebase of OpenJDK,.which Oracle itself uses as well for their binary builds. Slackware has not seen an update to its Java packages since that announcement. I have been busy in the past weeks preparing a set of Slackware OpenJDK packages. That was not trivial, since OpenJDK requires several additional packages in order to be compiled from source. It also required changes to Slackware’s gcc-java and seamonkey packages since I wanted OpenJDK to be “bootstrapped” against GCC’s java compiler. I could have chosen the easy way and compile it using a binary Java package downloaded from Oracle (which is acceptable as long as I do not re-distribute the downloaded binaries) but I had my reasons for not doing that – see below. I have now a working OpenJDK installed on my Slackware-current laptop, including a web-browser plugin for Java. That looks promising and I have uploaded all my work to the Slackware server so that Pat V. can have a look at it and ultimately add it to Slackware.

I had a goal in mind when I decided to take the hard way and compile OpenJDK using the (not fully compliant) GCC Java compiler It is the only way that we may finally be able to create a Java package for ARMedslack! The ARM port of Slackware currently has no Java support at all and I intend to change that.

You may ask, where this interest in Slackware ARM comes from. You have not read my recent posts perhaps?

It’s quite simple really. Because I think this platform is ready for prime time. The first powerful ARM based laptops have finally shown up. They are currently mostly running Android – think of the ASUS Transformer (powered by a Tegra 2 – essentially the chip which also powers a lot of the new Android tablets). You can barely fail to notice that all the big distros (Arch Linux, Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu) are working hard on a port to these new ARM platforms. I believe that Slackware should be part of that effort.

So, first of all, I am eagerly waiting for the Raspberry Pi devices to become available for sale. A computer for 35 dollars, that is something nobody should be able to resist. I want one of those and install ARMedslack on it. Stuart Winter is willing to port ARMedslack to this new device (hopefully the kernel is the only package which needs to be crafted specifically for the new ARM CPU). And second, I already bought another ARM based computer: the TrimSlice Pro. The TrimSlice is of an entirely different league than the low-spec Raspberry Pi. It runs on the same Nvidia Tegra-2 chip I already mentioned earlier. The Tegra 2 has a dual-core ARM CPU running at 1 GHz and a GeForce GPU which should be capable of 1080p full-screen HD video payback.The TrimSlice also has 1 GB of RAM and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux on a 32 GB SSD harddisk… now that screams to be replaced with Slackware. This device should be fast enough to be used for compilation of ARM packages. Stuart is working on a kernel for this device, but there are some complications. The TrimSlice uses a USB to SATA bridge to connect the SSD. That causes USB disconnects with the ARMedslack kernel when large amounts of data are written. Stuart will undoubtedly find a fix for that in the end.

And while Stuart works on the ARMedslack packages I have been considering what would be a second port to ARM. The crux is that ARMedslack supports a wide range of ARM computers (which is linked to the history of the port) and therefore does not profit from the new CPU’s which also have hardware floating point units (FPU). I want to try and start a port to “ARM hard float” architecture which should give it a big speed boost compared to ARMedslack. Of course, this means that the new port will not run on older devices like the SheevaPlug, or ARM based NAS/mediaplayer boxes which typically run cusom Debian distributions. I spent part of my holiday to write a script which cross-compiles a basic toolchain (kernel, binutils, glibc, gcc, bash and other necessary stuff) which can be used to compile the rest of Slackware. I now have a small root filesystem (containing a “armv7hl-slackware-linux-gnueabi” target) ready for testing on the TrimSlice. If only there is enough time left… my short X-Mas holiday is nearing its end, and with it the room to experiment.

Eric

I love rich oven dishes, and traditional greek “moussaka” is a long-time favourite of mine. I learnt how to cook it while I lived in a student home.

There are many variants of moussaka which do not honour the original method of preparation. Things like potatoes do not belong in moussaka.. while cinnamon, oregano and lots of vegetable oil do belong! I try to follow a more traditional approach. Any greek readers, please come up with improvements if your Mom had a different recipe!

The result will be a heavenly smell in your kitchen while the dish is finishing in the oven. Your belly will be all warm and fuzzy after emptying your plate.

The prime ingredient in moussaka is the aubergine, or eggplant. This fruit (commonly mistaken for a vegetable!)  is one of the family of nightshades – like tomatoes, cayenne, and even tobacco. It’s easy to spot in the pic below that this is a fruit – it contains seeds. Like with tomatoes and potatoes, there is a certain bitterness in the eggplant which you can eliminate by “sweating”, steaming or grilling. I am going to grill the eggplant.

Another ingredient which deserves a separate mention, is the béchamel sauce. This sauce of butter, flour and milk is thought by many people to be difficult to make, but in fact it is dead easy, The béchamel, along with grated cheese, will create a beautiful soft-crunchy crust on top of the moussaka.

Ingredients (4 persons):

• One eggplant
• one onion, chopped up
• three cloves of garlic, chopped up (do not squeeze them out)
• 400 grams of minced lamb meat (beef will do as well)
• one can of peeled tomatoes
• 150ml olive oil (sunflower oil will do)
• plenty of cinnamon and oregano
• pepper, salt
• 50 grams of butter
• 50 grams of flour
• 1/2 liter of milk
• 200 grams of grated young cheese

Preparation:

• Pre-heat the oven to 200°C
• First we create the meat/tomato sauce. Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a pan, add the chopped onion and garlic and let it cook for a few minutes until the onion gets a nice golden-brown color. Keep stirring with a wooden spoon to prevent the garlic from getting black and bitter.
• Add the minced meat, turn up the heat and let it cook for a few minutes until all of the meat has turned brown. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add lots of cinnamon powder and oregano. Don’t hold back! In this dish, more is better. In particular, you can never have too much cinnamon.
• Leave the meat and onions to simmer on a low fire for a few minutes. Then turn up the heat under the pan again, and add the peeled tomatoes. If these are not chopped-up tomato parts, you cut the tomatoes up into smaller pieces before you add them to the pan. Allow the tomato to integrate with the meat and onions; there is a lot of liquid in the tomatoes which needs to boil away. Then turn down the heat and leave it to simmer on low heat with the lid on the pan. We will not need the meat sauce until later and we might just as well allow the flavors to mix for as long as possible – it will enhance the dish. Don’t forget to taste! It may require more salt and cinnamon.
• We continue with the béchamel and the eggplant. You can work on these in parallel.

Eggplant:

• If you have a grill-pan, put it on the stove and heat it up. If you do not have a grill-pan, you can do with a flat frying pan, or use the oven grill – we are going to grill the eggplant
• Cut the top and bottom off the eggplant, removing the leaves. Cut the eggplant along its long side in slices of 0.5 cm (0.2 inch). Once exposed to the air, the slices will color brownish after a while so it is best to cut only a few slices at a time and apply the next step in the preparations.
• Brush both sides of an eggplant slice with olive oil and place it in the grill-pan. Leave it on the grill for a minute or two and then turn it over. This will make it tender, eliminate the bitter taste and sweeten the eggplant. You can put several slices in the grill pan at a time, to speed up the process.

Béchamel:

• Melt the butter in a pan (low heat) or in the microwave.
• Add the flour (all at once) and keep stirring the mixture (with the heat kept low!) so that you get a smooth mixture. Let the mixture (the “roux”) cook on low heat for about 4 minutes, this will eliminate the floury taste. While stirring, take the pan off the fire from time to time to keep the flour from turning brown – we want the béchamel to keep its white color.
• Gently, add the milk while you keep stirring the mix. Let it cook for another 10 minutes at least, stirring the béchamel sauce from time to time to keep it smooth and prevent burning. Then turn off the heat.

We continue with the final part:

• Brush the inside of an oven dish with olive oil. More is better. The oil will prevent the eggplant from sticking to the dish when it bakes in the oven.
• Cover the bottom of the oven dish with slices of grilled eggplant. On top of that, pour half of your meat/tomato sauce until it covers the eggplant. Then, add a new layer of eggplant slices and on top of that you pour the remaining half of the meat/tomato sauce. Sprinkle this with a generous amount of grated cheese. If you still have eggplant slices left, you can place those on top.
• Grab the pan with the béchamel sauce,, and pour it over the other ingredients in the oven dish. It will trickle down into the dish, but the majority will remain on top. Sprinkle some more grated cheese over the béchamel. Not too much cheese, the béchamel must remain visible! We do not want a burnt cheese crust, we want to create a soft crust of cheese mixed with the béchamel.
• Place the dish in the middle of your oven and let it bake for 20 minutes. The moussaka is ready when the crust starts turning light brown.

Serve it with some greek white wine like retsina.

I could eat this every week… but it took years to find an opportunity cook it because my son dislikes the taste of the eggplant. He still did not like it much… but he ate it all anyway.

Enjoy your meal!

Eric

You have to see the device to believe it, I guess. The videos and photos look very promising. It’s not in production yet but according to the developer team’s schedule first shipments should commence before the end of the year.

Its specifications are not stellar (256 MB of RAM will likely rule out the top-heavy desktop environments like KDE) but hey! it only costs 35 euros! And the ARM processor, a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with a ARM1176JZF-S core seems to have good support in the Linux kernel (a patch that adds support to linux-3.0.4 is fairly trivial). Check out this video which shows the Raspberry Pi running Quake III in 1920×1080 resolution with 4x antialiasing.

There is a thread on LinuxQuestions which shows that it may in fact not be hard to boot Slackware – or rather, ARMedslack. Using the latest QEMU which supports the Broadcom’s ARM version, and a recent kernel compiled for ARM (see above), QEMU can successfully boot one of ARMedslack’s “mini rootfs” filesystem images.

So, I think that the Raspberry Pi deserves Slackware. If we are going to bring Slackware to the masses, this ARM device would be a nice vehicle. I am going to get myself one or two of them. Stuart Winter (ARMedslack developer) promised to help me with the nasty bits. We will see how this ends up – either incorporated into ARMedslack, or as a separate development tree hosted by me, or (nicest option but not a very realistic one perhaps) folded into the main Slackware tree. It would be cool to have the main tree expand to support a third architecture besides x86 and x86_64.

Cool, another project for my evergrowing TODO list! Oh my… I can’t even find the time to spend on another project that is itching at the back of my mind… I guess should at least make an effort to upload all of the OCR related packages I created a month ago.

Eric

I hinted at this topic in a previous post. I have a big collection of (mostly) paperback Science Fiction books – some hardcover books too. I used to read a lot more in the pre-Internet days, nowadays it’s just during my holidays that I get enough time to read whole books in a short enough time… so many of those old paperbacks are 20-30 years old and yellowed.

In this digital age it would be appropriate to have digital versions of my books and save them from crumbling to dust. I am in anticipation of Sony’s new e-reader, the PRS-T1 which I want to buy once it is out:

This is a very nice device. It is also a lot cheaper than the previous generation Sony e-reader (the PRS-650) while at the same time adding wireless connectivity. This device needs content once I have it in my possession.

A lot of the “newer” books, and those written by contenporary authors can be purchased online, or downloaded from fan sites where people scan their own collections into EPUB or MOBI e-books.  That is all good and well, but on my bookshelves I have many dozens good books that will probably never see a new life as an e-book. That is very unfortunate… I had a lot of fun reading them and do not want to see them go into oblivion.

I decided to do something about this. I am going to try and describe (and hopefully implement) how I am going to digitize my book library. Note: at the moment this is all just ideas, “dreams” if you wish, although I have already found quite a bit of information on the Internet that I will be sharing with you. I want it to be more than just a dream.

What does one need to get a paper book converted into an e-book?

1. the book’s pages need to be scanned
2. the scanned bitmaps may have to be cleaned-up digitally (enhancing the contrast between characters and background, de-skewing or rotating the text blocks, …)
3. I need an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program to convert the bitmap images into character text
4. I need an e-book editor to layout the bare text that I got from the OCR program – the ebook has to look largely like the original paper version.
5. I want to use a library program to make my book catalogue available, to myself of course, to my e-reader device, and possibly to other interested parties.

And I want this to be as low-cost as possible. Any software that I am going to use for this should preferably be Open Source and run on Slackware.

Those are the main topics I will write about. Each of these topics deserves its own separate article. Why is that?

I can already see how this project will confront me with interesting challenges. I am going to write a multi-post story with interlinked articles (this being the first) in order to preserve this hobby project of mine for posterity. Having separate topic articles allows me to split up your feedback as well (heh… I hope I do get some feedback!), so that discussions about, say, scanning techniques will not interfere with talk about what is the best OCR program for Linux.

The articles are not going to be “static” per se. I value your feedback and important new insights will find their way back into the main text.

Let’s see where this ends. It is probably going to take days, or weeks,  to write. It delends a bit on Slackware development – if that picks up speed again, I will have less time for this ebook side show. But for the moment , there is silence in the ChangeLog.txt and I have time to spare.

Eric

Direct links to the packages follow, but you can check out any of the available mirrors of course.

KDE 4.6.5:

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/x86_64/kde/kdelibs-4.6.5-x86_64-2alien.txz (gpg signature)
• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/x86/kde/kdelibs-4.6.5-i486-2alien.txz (gpg signature)

KDE 4.7.1:

• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.1/x86_64/kde/kdelibs-4.7.1-x86_64-2alien.txz (gpg signature)
• http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.7.1/x86/kde/kdelibs-4.7.1-i486-2alien.txz (gpg signature)

The new KDE 4.7.2 wich is right beyond the corner will have this fix incorporated.

Then there is the Adobe Flash Player.

Finally we have a Linux flash player for both 32bit and 64bit that is on the same terms as the MS Windows version. Yesterday, Adobe announced the official release of their Flash Player release 11 for all platforms. Some of you will cheer, others will moan, but nevertheless this is a milestone in 64bit Linux support. It was (in part) because of the availability of 64bit Flash for Linux that I started the 64bit Slackware port in 2008.

I have packages for you here:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/

Or on any of my package mirrors, like:

• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/
• http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/
• http://scw.net.br/alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/

And Slackware-current, some people are speculating on huge updates in the near future because there has been such a long silence on the update front. Please do not get too disappointed if the amount of updates is not as big as you might hope. Sometimes, there is real life to take care of.

And then there was this:

I am pondering about another blog post, but the idea has not yet finalized in my mind. What it boils down to is, how should I digitize my rather big library of vintage Science Fiction books? I have many tens, maybe a hundred books that certainly will never be released in digital format, and I am looking at the tools to make the conversion. Slackware packages for all the (OCR and scan cleaning) software that I think I will need have been compiled but I hesitate to release them. Mainly because I have not yet tested them myself… ideas are welcome, especially ideas about how to go about the scanning process (I do not want to cut up my books). More to follow!

Cheers, Eric

I just upgraded the blog software and took the opportunity to also update to a new version of the wp-andreas01 theme that I have been using for my blog since day one. The new theme is more versatile, fixes some rendering bugs, draws a wider pane (1024 instead of 800 pixels) which I think is a more pleasant reading experience.

Please refresh your browser cache if you see graphical glitches. I had to rescale the banner images too, but they still look good:

Eric

In a previous post of mine, I showed you how to allow Firefox to keep using the Google Toolbar even though it lists as “unsupported” since firefox-5. But this is not a long-term option of course – at some point the plugin will become incompatible because it is no longer being developed and it will de-stabilize my browser.

So I was thinking, what are the reasons why I wanted to stick with the Google toolbar for so long? The plugin has some great features which I really don’t want to miss. Let me list them here, along with ways to get the same or similar functionality in Firefox but without using the Google Toolbar.

1. Search through my search history. I guess this is is the feature I use most. Of course, Firefox keeps an accessible history of the URLs you visited, but re-using previous search phrases is something different. The Google Toolbar showed your entire search history in a neat dropdown. But this functionality is also present in Firefox’s own search field… I just never knew. If you type a single space character into the search entry field, then Firefox will display a dropdown with all your previous search phrases.
2. Translate web pages. Using this a lot as well, to find out what those damn Russians are telling about Slackware… but there are other plugins that add the same functionality to your right-click context menu in Firefox. One that seems to get the best reviews because of its feature set is gTranslate. One disadvantage compared to the googlebar is, that it does not give me the option to translate a complete web page, it is limited to translating selected bits of text.
3. Bookmark sync. When you work on many different computers and want your bookmarks available everywhere, then Google Toolbar woould let you. However, Firefox has its own “sync” functionality since version 4 which allows you to sync your bookmarks, history and other stuff to a central server, much like Google does too. And if you do not want to rely on 3rd party servers you can always setup your own private bookmark server like I did, using SiteBar. A killer feature of SiteBar is that it has ACLs (access control lists) allowing users of the service to share (parts of) their bookmarks with other users or groups.
4. Use highlighted text to search in Google. It is so convenient to just highlight a piece of text and then right-click to use that text as a search phrase in Google. It is a must-have feature for me, but luckily there is an add-on called Context Search which will even expand the list of selectable search engines to beyond just Google.

Well that was not all that many reasons for needing the Google Toolbar, but even then: their value is high because of the way they allow me to be more productive and efficient in my work. I guess I will have to give the alternatives a try and see if I can live without the Google Toolbar. Realizing that I have to, I can only say “so long, and thanks for all the fish” to the people who have been developing this plugin over the years.

While I am at it, I think I am also going to try out Right-Click-Link (opening URLs in a new tab that are listed in a page as plain text), which seem to be useful as well.

Eric

A number of big packages are coming up fairly soon. There will be a new LibreOffice (3.4, a major release), and VLC as well will probably have another release shortly. Also, I should be working on KDE 4.6.3.

I am looking at ways to make this manageable for me. Compiling LibreOffice packages takes forever, even for a single Slackware release. Building LibreOffice packages for both Slackware 13.1 and 13.37 will simply take too much of my time.

So, I am interested to find who is running my LibreOffice 3.3.2 package on Slackware 13.37. Do you have issues? Is it working well? I can tell you that I have no issues with that package, and I am using it on my Slackware 13.37 laptop. I will make a decision based on the feedback I will get from you.

For any other package, I will probably switch to creating them for Slackware 13.37 exclusively. You will have no problem compiling your own version of a package for an older Slackware, using my sources. It’s just that you do not want to compile something like LibreOffice yourself!

Please leave your comments below the article.

Thanks, Eric

What the heck, I hear you say! I’d better explain why I did this, and what it actually means.

I have a wireless network in the house that extends to a large part of the rooms. Unfortunately we have thick walls and ceilings with a lot of steel-reenforced concrete, and this causes less-than-ideal wireless reception in parts of the house. The thick concrete walls do not invite drilling a lot of holes for CAT5 cables. I had to think of something else that minimized the drilling of holes and still gave me a network that covers all of the house.

I have been using a WRT54GL (its selling point being that it can easily be flashed with alternative Linux based firmware) until now. This gave me a wireless speed of 54 Mbit/sec (802.11g) maximum. I have flashed this router with an alternative firmware, tomato, which really helped me getting my Internet router stable and feature-rich while at the same time I was able to raise the transmission power a bit… but not enough.

Linksys WRT54GL

So what I did was to buy a new wireless dual-band router with 802.11n speeds (300 Mbit/sec) which gives the existing wireless LAN a boost. This new router had to be capable of running tomato firmware too (because I am fond of it) and the dual-band gave me a way to leverage the old WRT54GL without killing the speeds of the larger wireless LAN: a dual-band router basically has two wireless access points built-in. I found the Cisco/Linksys E3000EW at a very interesting price (it is being followed up by a new device, the E4200). It also has an USB port (for connecting a hard drive or a printer) and I found that the tomatousb firmware (a successful mod of the tomato firmware) fully supports this device.

Cisco/Linksys E3000-EW

The E3000EW was switched on and two minutes later, the poor bugger was running tomato firmware! A firmware upgrade through HTTP upload using the standard Linksys firmware worked flawlessly.

Now the first task was to copy the configuration of the old WRT54GL to the new E3000EW. That was not too hard. AlsoI setup the two internal access points with two different ESSIDS of course. Then I quickly swapped the two (after “cloning” the WAN MAC address so that I would not have to go through my ISP’s provisioning setup again) and I had freed the WRT54GL for re-configuration into a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.

What was my plan? To position the WRT54GL in the house, nearby the area where wireless signals were weak because of the steel and concrete. Its position would be where I do have a good wireless connectivity. From that point on, I would run CAT5 cable from the WRT54GL to the computers that needed to be connected. This would mean, much less cable and much less drilling.

Actually, that was the final plan, which I implemented. Originally I wanted to create a distributed wireless network using WDS, which is a technique (supported by the tomato firmware) to connect multiple wireless access points. However, when I started reading about these techniques, it turned out that WDS effectively cuts your wireless network speeds in half with every “hop” that you create in your network. And I was not prepared for lower speeds… even though the advantage would be that I did not have to run new CAT5 cables. Access points with WDS still accept client connections, so all I would have to do was put the second AP in a location where it gave good coverage to the computers that suffered from problematic wireless reception.

The thing with Wireless Ethernet Bridging (WET) is this: the second Access Point, deployed to connect to the “master” and create the bridge, dedicates its wireless link to that bridged connection. It will no longer accept connections from wireless clients. It means that the computers need to connect to it using conventional cable!

It was a matter of weighing the pros and the cons. I decided on creating the bridge and using cables, because that would keep the maximum network speed acceptible.

So the old WRT54GL was reconfigured (using a network cable of course, you can not do this wirelessly). And it works surprisingly well! I am writing this article while my laptop is connected to this device using a cable and the traffic is bridged across the air. So, whoopee!

There are a few gotcha’s that I ran into, before I finally found out what it takes to successfully create a wireless bridge.

• The “master” router (the E3000EW in this case) needs to be configured as a Wireless Access Point – that is the default, so I could leave that one alone.
• The secondary router (the WRT54GL) needs to be configured, not as a router but as a gateway (in the tomato’s Advanced > Routing menu) or else your traffic is not going to reach the “master” router at the other end of the bridge.
• The wireless security must be set to “WPA Personal”, with AES encryption (in the tomato’s Basic > Network menu). I had left this setting to “WPA/WPA2 Personal” at first, using AES for ecryption (this was what I used when the WRT54GL was still my Internet router), and it would refuse to connect to the wireless master. If you look more closely to the dropdown menu for the security settings, you’ll see that the tomato warns that WPA is the only accepted choice…
• The WRT54GL can function as a wireless bridge without having an IP address assigned to it. However, you lose the ability to make a HTTP connection to the administrative interface – and someday that will prove to be very inconvenient. So I gave the router an unused IP address from my LAN address range.

Remember, when you setup a bridge, you are extending your network transparently. A network bridge passes network packets back and forth without dividing the network in two segments. Computers in the LAN will be unaware of the bridged connection – it does not show up in a traceroute. There is another solution for my problem that I have not gone deeper into, and that is to setup the WRT54GL as a “wireless client”. This creates a new network segment though… which requires that you run a DHCP server on the WRT54GL for the wired client computers that you connect to the device.

And yet another option is to install the “dd-wrt” firmware and configure the WRT54GL as a Wireless Repeater which allows you to connect your computers wirelessly to the device… but dd-wrt is not nearly as userfriendly as tomato. Pick your choice.

This is the network diagram I ended up with (courtesy of oldspeak where I also obtained the final piece of the puzzle):

Wireless Ethernet Bridge

And what about powerline / homeplug, you ask?

I have considered that, and sometime ago, when my wireless conneciton problems became aggravating, I even wanted to buy a set of 200 Mbit Devolo mini adapters. They would give me 100 Mbit effective network speeds, but I still would have to buy a second wireless access point if I wanted to extend my wireless LAN, or else I would have had to use conventional cable. That made me decide to pick the geeky solution.

Eric