Non-XOs showing up in neighborhood

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 00:36 +0800, Trent Lloyd wrote:
> Hi Sjoerd,
> 
> Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 05:16:17PM +0200, Michael Rueger wrote:
> >   
> >> Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> >>
> >>     
> >>> The Chat activity can uses multi-user chats afaik, which is something only
> >>> supported by telepathy-salut (it's not standardized). So you won't be able to
> >>> talk to them unless they use a Telepathy based client.
> >>>       
> >> So this mean everybody in wireless range and a Telepathy client can chat 
> >> with the kids on the XO mesh?
> >>     
> >
> > Yes. There is no (real) difference in the telepathy-salut you can install on
> > your normal machine and the one on the XO. So you can talk to each-other.
> >
> > Joining the mesh without an XO is hard though (as afaik there are no other
> > machines supporting 802.11s). I'm assuming the Jonathan was using a normal
> > wireless network when he saw others online, not a mesh.
> >   
> I was under some kind of weird impression you could join the mesh as a 
> ad-hoc client, you just wouldn't actually participate in any meshing, 
> which seems to be confirmed by the fact at GUADEC, for example, you'd 
> see an 'olpc-mesh' network as ad-hoc?
> 
> No idea if this actually works, however, or perhaps I'm totally bongo 
> bananas....

No, not really... the wireless part is a virualized adapter, and the
mesh interface piggybacks on the normal 802.11 interface.  The mesh has
a comletely different frame format, so normal laptops are not able to
speak olpc mesh.  However, to get the mesh stuff up, you have to bring
up the normal 802.11 interface in ad-hoc mode, which means it beacons,
which means you'll see "olpc-mesh" from other machines.  Those machines
can join the 802.11 ad-hoc network, but that's separate from the "mesh".

dan