I thought it might be convenient to set up the laptop as a wifi access point sometimes (especially when copying images off of the Flashair SD card in the cameras, since they have very short range).
There’s apparently no built-in method in any Linux distribution to have a wifi card be both an AP and a client at the same time. This is probably because it’s a very complicated task depending on lots of hardware and software details. But someone has taken a stab at it, anyway.
On my new Lenovo Carbon X1 laptop, with this wifi controller
04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7265 (rev 59)
it doesn’t work. If NetworkManager is running, it just says “Device busy” when creating the ap0 device. If I stop NetworkManager, I’m able to create the AP, but if I then start NetworkManager, it’s unable to connect to the real AP.
On my old Lenovo Carbon X1 laptop, with this wifi controller
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N
6205 [Taylor Peak] (rev 96)it works! And it’s much, much faster copying pictures from the Flashair card when it talks directly to the laptop than copying pictures via a separate AP. Which makes sense, but I didn’t think it would be like 5x faster…
Looking at “iw list” on both, they both seem to claim that they should be able to be a client and an AP.
Does anybody have an idea whether the newer chipset just isn’t capable, anyway?
This is a test.