A strange question on wireless

[peahen]

I have my new T60 installed with Ubuntu Feisty. Everything seems to work, including wireless (seems that Feisty has a better support on wireless because it's already there after installation. i didn't even bother to do it manually).

However then I found even though wireless functioned properly, it was extremely slow. For example, when i tried to ping yahoo.com or google.com, there were almost 80% packet loss. The speed became OK only when I tried to move my laptop very close to router.

I then suspected the signal strength was week but if I booted into XP home, the speed was totally fine at my desk. Actually the wireless signal strength should be OK because my other two laptops (windows) have no problem with it. Now i am guessing there are probably some issues with drivers but I have no idea of where and how to fix them. Any suggestions? many thanks.

My T60 uses Intel wireless card.

[insert_name_here]

I assume that your wireless card is an Atheros AR5212. (You can find out by typing in the command line "lspci | grep Atheros") This is a known bug, I suffer from it too. http://madwifi.org/ticket/1343

The problem lies in the madwifi drivers, which are written to interface with Atheros networking chips. The only solution I've yet seen is to remove madwifi from your system and use ndiswrapper and the windows wireless driver. Ndiswrapper is a wrapper which allows linux to use windows wireless drivers. The step-by-step is here:http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=434595&page=4[/url]

[insert_name_here]

I found a better solution - just upgrade your madwifi driver.

Here are the commands to perform:

sudo –s
<enter your password>
apt-get –y install build-essential bin86
cd /usr/src
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-ng-current.tar.gz
tar -xzf madwifi-ng-current.tar.gz
rm madwifi-ng-current.tar.gz
apt-get –y install sharutils linux-headers-`uname –r`
ls –d madwifi*
cd <madwifi-name>
export KERNELPATH=/usr/src/linux-`uname –r`
export KERNELRELEASE=`uname –r`
make clean
make
make install

Note that the ` character is right above the TAB key and to the left of the 1.

Note that <madwifi name> is a folder name that resembles madwifi-ng-r2478-20070618. This is the snapshot taken of the stable driver.

[jbinto]

Hello,

I've noticed the same thing on my T60 which has an Atheros AR5418 chip. Happens using both Feisty and Gentoo. Unfortunately with Feisty, the madwifi drivers don't support the 5418 just yet so I had to run SVN anyway.

insert_name_here, were you having problems with disassociating and reassociating before upgrading to the snapshot, or was it just slow bitrates? I'm running SVN r2456, quite recent but obviously not the newest, and the problem is still happening.

If anyone is having these troubles with the AR5418, please let me know. I can't seem to find anyone using the 5418.

This madwifi bug refers to the 5212 but is identical to what I'm experiencing:
http://madwifi.org/ticket/1081

All the victims seem to be Thinkpad users...

[insert_name_here]

I was having problems where the signal strength was low, which led to dissociation and reassociation, which in turn caused system stability issues (e.g. freezing). I believe that this was a result of madwifi not powering the wifi card correctly.