6

I have (more precisely, my employer has) a machine running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which comes with wpa_supplicant version 2.1. There are improvements in wpa_supplicant 2.5 which I believe may help with some wifi issues this machine is suffering.

According to dpkg -S, wpa_supplicant is in the wpasupplicant package, but sudo apt-get upgrade wpasupplicant tells me I already have the latest version available.

Is there a PPA in some standard place that would let me bring wpa_supplicant up to version 2.5? Or is it better to build from source? Or is there something else I should be doing?

(The less drastic and invasive the upgrade procedure, the better for us: this machine is actually on someone else's premises and we can connect to it only via wifi. So it would be sad if trying to upgrade wpa_supplicant had the effect of breaking its wifi connection. A brief interruption of connectivity is fine, though.)

dlin
  • 3,900
Gareth McCaughan
  • 201
  • Right now even xenial is using 2.4. So you won't be able to find it through any standard ubuntu repositories, but you may find it elsewhere. Worst case scenario you can compile it from source. this link may give you some help on that route – Mitch Feb 03 '16 at 17:30
  • Step 0, Before you search for the source for wpa_supplicant, build it, and install it hoping it won't break WiFi and MIGHT fix your problem, is to diagnose your WiFi problem. zgrep wlan /var/log/kern.log* on both ends will give you something to start with. Applying a random solution before knowing what the problem is NEVER ends well. – waltinator Feb 03 '16 at 18:01
  • Good advice, waltinator. As it happens, I am not applying a random solution before knowing what the problem is; I have done some diagnostic work, found a specific problem and good reason to think it responsible for many of the issues the machine is suffering, and established that there is a fix for that problem in 2.5 but not in earlier versions. I didn't go into those details in the question because I didn't consider them relevant. – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 11:11
  • (If you're curious, see http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034640.html for the problem, http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034641.html for the info that 2.5 has a fix, and http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/hostap/2016-February/034646.html for the principal developer of wpa_supplicant saying it should be safe to upgrade.) – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 11:14
  • 1
    For what it's worth, what I've actually done so far is: grab a 2.5 tarball, adjust its config file to match what Ubuntu 14.04 expects, build, and then upgrade in place by moving the wpa_supplicant executable out of the way, copying the new one into its location, and then killing the wpa_supplicant process. (It gets restarted automatically and it's the new one that runs.) No bad consequences are apparent, but of course there might be trouble lurking to bite us later... – Gareth McCaughan Feb 04 '16 at 16:59
  • 1
    @GarethMcCaughan did it solve you problem? I'm having the same issue, feel free to answer here https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/385364/3285 – Evan Carroll Aug 11 '17 at 03:32
  • 1
    It seemed to work, yes. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '17 at 11:12

0 Answers0