Ubuntu 7.04, G4 iBook, and WPA2

I *think* I've finally managed to get WPA2 working with Ubuntu 7.04 on my old G4 iBook. I'm putting that huge qualifier in there because it seemed almost TOO easy, and I'm waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop.

I believed, like many others, that the issue was the Broadcom chipset in the Airport Extreme wireless built in to the iBook.

It turns out that the (as I understand it) process of converting WPA passwords into hex keys gets screwed up by Network Manager on the PPC architecture. It's a "big endian" versus "little endian" thing . . . basically, some machines store bit values from right to left (i.e. the least significant digit is on the right), while the Macintosh does it from left to right (i.e. the least significant digit is on the left).

In other words, if you let Network Manager do the password to hex key conversion for you, it's "backwards." If you bypass the conversion process entirely, and go straight to the hex key itself-- you should be in!

At least, that seems to be what worked for me.

In terminal, type this:

wpa_passphrase your_ssid your_password

You should get a sixty-four character hex key in the result. Highlight and copy that key in your terminal session, then try to reconnect to your WPA2-protected network with the Network Manager. When prompted for your password, paste the 64-character hex key in place instead. If you have the option of telling Ubuntu to remember your password, I'd recommend taking advantage of it-- because manually generating, copying and pasting that long key is going to get really old pretty quick.

Hope that works for you as nicely as it did for me!

And remember, I'm pro-Linux, NOT a Linux-pro-- so don't expect me to be able to field any and all questions that people might be inclined to leave here in the comments!