Web Worker Daily has a post about the city of Atlanta hooking up with Earthlink to provide a city-wide wifi service. Check out the Earthlink press release here. It probably won’t be cheap, but its better than nothing.

I’m sitting at Octane, a coffee bar here in Atlanta. I order a quad espresso, sit down, and fire up the laptop. I go to System -> Administration -> Networking. I select the Wireless connection and the properties button. Click on the drop down arrow for a listing of available networks.

Nothing.

WTF?!? There are about 10 people around me surfing. There has to be something. Then I remember. This bug got introduced in Ubuntu 6.10.

But this is only a GUI bug. There must be a way of scanning for networks. Thats right: iwlist. From the iwlist man pages, iwlist will “Get more detailed wireless information from a wireless interface.” Awesome. I do a

iwlist eth1 scanning

I get a list of access points, protocols supported, and whether or not they require encryption. I see the ESSID for the hotspot router, type it into the GUI.

Bingo. Connected to the Internet again.

Thank god for the CLI.

Update: In Ubuntu 7.04, I’ve noticed that the above command only lists the network you are connected to at the moment. So to see all networks use sudo:

sudo iwlist scanning