Looking for a way to manage your Apple Airport Express under Ubuntu? There are two ways, but the only decent option is to run Apple’s Airport Utility under Wine.

You could try the airport-utils package, but that only installs an old, and very incomplete, Java client. If you go that route, be sure to manually run the .jar with a 1.5 jvm. See this write up, for further info. You’ll quickly find lots of issues with this client, however!

Instead, you can run the official Apple software under Wine, with relatively few issues. The trickiest thing is to run under 32bit Wine, and not 64bit (assuming you’re running 64-bit Ubuntu). I run a separate Wine configuration for this to keep it separate from my other Wine-based software.

# 1. Initialise a new Wine configuration (32-bit) in ~/.wine32
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 winecfg

# 2. Run the installer (assumed to be in Drive C: of your new Wine folder)
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 wine .wine32/drive_c/AirPortSetup.exe

# 3. Run the application itself
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine32 wine .wine32/drive_c/Program\ Files/AirPort/APUtil.exe

It’s not the prettiest UI, but I’ve been able to manage the Airport Express, including adding new MAC addresses (“Timed Access”), etc.).