Why is wireless so hard?
So, my N9 wireless hotspot didn’t work for a long time; it just returned a ‘not allowed’ error. Apparently, this ‘feature’ is because the N9 ships to… well, wherever this one happened to come from… with a disabled adhoc mode. The fix, provided by this thread, is trivial: Enable developer mode, open the terminal, and type:
devel-su
echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/wl1271/allow_adhoc
(Note: ‘echo 1>’ is not the same as “echo 1 >”; oops.)
The password for devel-su on the N9 is apparently ‘rootme’ — simple.
But that just gives me adhoc wifi, and the Acer Iconia… not so happy with that. And unfortunately, unlike the N9, rooting the Iconia is decidedly more difficult.
So, the fix to get working Ad-hoc wireless support on the Iconia is to install a wpa_supplicant from another device that *does* support it. But that requires root. And there is no application out there that provides root for the Iconia running 3.2 — the ‘fix’ is to downgrade to an earlier version, then upgrade to 3.2 by running some different firmware that provides root out of the box.
So, I’d have to downgrade, then install a new firmware — not supported by the manufacturer, and probably losing my netflix access in the process — then install a modified wpa_supplicant which might or might not work. All just to get it so that I can use the wifi provided by my phone on my tablet.
Of course, this isn’t as bad as the Windows Phone, where I can’t even *do* that — there is simply no way to get ad-hoc wireless support on the Windows Phone that I can find, hacked or not. (mmm, closed source.)
Why must everything be so hard?