Working wpa_supplicant.conf configuration for the network uw-secure at UWaterloo for Xperia X10 (1.6)

While Sony Ericsson has promised us that they will update X10 with a moderately recent version (2.1) of the Android Operating System by Q4 2010, those of us who are stuck with Android 1.6 cannot normally connect to the most wireless networks using WPA-EAP including uw-wireless at the University of Waterloo. Apparently, the reason is while Android 1.6 does support WPA-EAP, there is no user interface (!) for editing these network configurations.

Fortunately, X10 (including X10a sold in Canada by Rogers) has been rooted very recently by the people at xda-developers.com. You can follow the guidelines here (For X10a users, it is important to install stuff in the post #5 as well).

After obtaining the root of the phone, you can edit the file wpa_supplicant.conf in /data/misc/wifi directory. I made a copy before making changes just in case. It is important that the owner and the permission of the file remains the exact same (owner: system, group: wifi and permission: 660).

Using your favourite method, append the following to the file:

network={
    ssid="uw-secure"
    scan_ssid=1
    proto=WPA
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    eap=PEAP
    identity="UWDirID"
    password="UWDirPASSWORD"
    phase1="peaplabel=0"
    phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

I’ve assembled the configuration from this post at Arch Linux Forum by vogt. Two modifications I made is that I removed the line specifying ca_cert and added the line proto=WPA. For whatever reason, the phone will ignore the configuration if there is no proto=WPA line.