[X-Unix] Networking when booting OS X in text mode

[Alexandre Gauthier]

Hello,
As most of you already know, you can use OS X in almost pure 
frambuffered console mode by doing a few nasty tweaks and typing 
 >console as the username in the login prompt. This should dump you in 
pure text mode, no graphical window server whatsoever.

However, my concern is the following.

*** The Wrong:
Apparently, OS X seems to initialize networking for, say, airport in my 
case, only when a graphical session is started.
It seems that all adapters are brought up, but they don't seem to follow 
the profile currently applied. They just stand there, basically, in 
"unknown" state. Following this logic, they only seem to work when you 
are _logged in_ as well. I don't think networking is fully operational 
(at least in the case of 802.11b) until you have started a session. At 
least in my case.
I understand why that would happen, since profiles and the airport 
manager seem to only apply inside your session since the airport applet 
is only launched then.

*** The what:
Well, I would like to know if there is a way to enable networking while 
in full text-mode-only-we-like-framebuffered-consoles mode.
So far, ifconfig returns the interface (ne1), but it is in the state 
"unknown".

*** The why:
Don't ask why I want to do this ;) I just feel like it. It has to do 
with me being easily distracted when programming bash (I tend to do 
everything in perl, whenever I can. As for if that is a good or a bad 
habit... ;P), and a strange, utterly immoral fondness for text 
environnements.

Anyways, this e-mail is most likely not making much sense, sorry -- but 
it's 2:13 AM and I've been up for well over 35 hours.
I'll re-read this tommorow and when I'll come to my senses and ponder 
about parsing this message through sed and awk in order to make some 
sense out of it, and then i'll follow it up with another one saying how 
sorry I am, and with precisions.

Why am I not sending it only tommorow instead? Well, I just tought of 
that six lines ago, and I will send it anyways because i'm cool like that.

Thank you all in advance for your patience

--
Alexandre Gauthier
supernaut at underwares.org

underwares.org
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