Note: This article documents how to run the airport-utils tool in Ubuntu
14.04 Trusty. Even though I was able to launch it and log into my AirPort router, the
package is outdated and bugged, so I do not recommend to use it.
As a wireless router, I use an Apple AirPort Extreme station. It comes with a configuration
program that is only available for Mac OS / iOS and Windows, but not Linux. There is no
browser interface for this router.
To configure the station in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions, there's a package
called airport-utils available. You can install it by typing the following commands to a Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install airport-utils
The configuration interface for the 2nd generation AirPort Extreme is launched with
airport2-config
There is only one problem: After hitting Enter, nothing happens. The airport-utils package
doesn't seem to work with Ubuntu 14.04, as it requires a Java 5 (or earlier) runtime
environment, but Ubuntu 14.04 only provides Java 6 and 7 packages. Fortunately, this can be
solved by installing the gcj-4.8-jre package:
sudo apt-get install gcj-4.8-jre
After installation has finished, you can launch the configuration interface by typing:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-gcj-4.8-amd64/bin/java -jar /usr/share/java/airport-
utils/AirPort2BaseStationConfig.jar
The interface itself seems to be outdated. Lots of functions are bugged or broken. It will not let
you type certain special characters to the password field, so if your password contains special
characters, you may have to type your password to an editor, and copy&paste it from there to
the password field.
1/2Even more disappointing, most settings of the AirPort station are not recognized at all. In my
case, only the station name and some IP addresses are correct, but the rest is missing.
From this point, it is very
obvious that the best
options for Linux users to
configure their AirPort
router are to use either
Wine to run Apple's AirPort
Utility for Windows, or (it
they have an iOS device)
the AirPort Utility app for
iOS.
2/2