I'm new to the Pineapple and not a strong Linux user. I've been playing with the gadget for a couple od days, and have been having a ball. I did run into a few issues that I've resolved, and though I'd share them here for other newbies.
1. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu on my laptop to run beside Windows 7 - all in all this was better than trying to manage a Linux machine through Windows machine.
2. My Mark V was bricked out of the box, but the unbricking instructions worked like a charm.
3. After two days of playing it became clear that I needed a larger and faster Micro SD card. Putting in a fast 16GB card was well worth the cost. I now install all my infusions to the card.
4. I set my V to have the second radio attach to my home wireless or my Verizon MiFi to get an internet connection. Pretty much all day yesterday I actually connected to and managed the V via my iPad via the web interface and an SSH terminal program on the iPad. The issue I had is after a reboot it would take a lot of trying and retrying to get Wlan1 to connect to the internet AP while keep Wlan0 running as my test AP. Downloading and installing WiFi Manager solved this problem - this infusion is highly recommended if you are going to use the second radio as your internet connection.
5. Karm, SSLStirp and tcpdump all installed with no drama.
6. I watched Chris Haralson's video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=nw4bo4rXGgQ and was able to get evilportal and nodogsplash running fine. I even followed his suggestion and modified the splash pages in photoshop for my purposes. One use I plan for this gadget is to provide concrete proof to certain skeptics about how easy it is to hijack folks with so called "free internet" hotspots.
7. Finally, for laughs, I set up occupineapple. I found the install to be easy, but when fired up all the SSID's I saw were gobbledygook. A post in this forum indicated that is caused by extraneous characters in the .list file, so I just used nano to create a new clean mine.list file and Boom! She works.
8. My next project is going to use my coworkers as willing guinea pigs to show how evilportal, karma and tcpdump can be used to collect packets and parse them for things like usernames, email addresses, log-ins and such. I do not allow any wireless AP's on our internal network. All the AP's are on the outside of the firewall. To access internal services wirelessly my users have to start a Citrix XenDesktop session, which is encrypted. That causes no end of whining from folks that think "Wireless is so convenient!"
Love this toy!
Kevin