iwevent & wpa_supplicant

Post #358,089 by scoenye 5/26/12 9:28:15 PM Reply	iwevent & wpa_supplicant iwevent will list hardware sputterings and some network changes. wpa_supplicant has a debug mode that will show connection failures (assuming WPA is in user) Depending on how old that model is, it is possible the WiFi chipset is not properly supported by the Linux drivers in that Ubuntu release. There are three chips listed for the T41: Intel, Atheros and Cisco. The Intel drivers have been reliable for a long time, the Atheros drivers had some issues until ~2010. I've never dealt with the Cisco Aironet chipset. The drivers, open source or otherwise, need binary firmware blobs. Getting the right/latest version of those was tricky as well as sometimes you had to hack it out of the Windows drivers. There are some tools for that in the repositories, but more recent Debian distros now have the firmware in non-free and at least this problem has gone away. (The binary only firmware is a consequence of the FCC regs to avoid interference.)
Post #358,091 by Another Scott 5/26/12 9:42:26 PM Reply	Thanks very much. I'll check into those things. What's weird is that it always seemed reasonably fine with older Ubuntu versions. It sat for around a year, until a couple of weeks ago when I decided to start using it again (in hopes that it would be good enough for light web stuff while watching TV, etc.). I upgrades to the latest LTS version without much trouble, then started having these disconnection issues. Of course, it's not consistent. I've got an Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01) according to the "System Testing" thingy. I suspect there are some motherboard issues with this particular one (USB ports are quite erratic, but everything else seems Ok), but it's been pretty reliable otherwise. Thanks for the pointers. I'll see if I can track it down without too much time investment.... Cheers, Scott.
Post #358,092 by scoenye 5/26/12 10:28:05 PM Reply	Consolidation The WiFi network stack went through at least one major rewrite that affected pretty much everything around that time. The older drivers were not compatible with the new stack and some chipsets ended up orphaned. The new style drivers to others were no were near maturity.
Post #358,093 by Another Scott 5/26/12 10:50:10 PM Reply	Ah, "progress". :-/ The same things are happening on the Win2k side. Firefox managed to upgrade itself, but the updated plugins like Flash won't install because Win2k's Kernel32.dll is too old. I've got a Fujitsu P7120D that's still a neat little laptop - that's my night-time reading PC. It's running Ubuntu 8.x LTS and is still running well. Trouble is, it has a 60 GB 1.8" hard drive that is nearly full and there are no replacements that I've been able to find. Oh well. I see that Lenovo has a refurbished i7 X220 with 8 GB, an IPS screen, and a SSD for around $1k. I've also looked around occasionally at the MacBook Airs but their limited RAM has always given me pause. Maybe Tim Cook will have something compelling to announce next month... Thanks again. Cheers, Scott.
Post #358,094 by static 5/26/12 11:25:37 PM Reply	Linux system programmers like doing that. :-( The X11 system had a few major upgrades in the last few years. Although a lot of it was driven by the likes of driver developers inside Intel (and generally needed to be done), they were still dropping features before they had replacements ready. I really liked how I could have :0.0 and :0.1 with the one dual-head card, but they did away with that trick. After I filed a bug, I actually got to complain to one of the programmers. His response boiled down to "we took that feature away because we've rebuilt the whole subsystem that could do it; you can do something similar in a future version." I said that wasn't acceptable and I wanted that feature back. He didn't respond. AFAIK, it still hasn't returned. I guess if I could be bothered, I could go see if the bug was still open... Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/

Welcome to IWETHEY!