[conspire] Reality Check: Questions on recommended Wireless PCI and PCMCIA Cards for Ubuntu 7.04

[Bill Moseley]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 12:21:20PM -0700, Adrien Lamothe wrote:
> I've had really good results with Atheros based wireless cards. I've
> run Feisty on several laptops, with a slightly older SMC B/G pcmcia
> card, and it works great all the time. I found the card at Fry's for
> $24.95, about 3 years ago.

I have a new (since Monday) Thinkpad T60p with an internal Atheros
card running Feisty.

So far wireless has not worked well at all.  It only sometimes will
associated with my AP.  I've had slightly better luck using an Cisco
Aeronetnet 350 in the machine, but it's been spotty as well.

It's not the AP (GW302) -- I have no problems at all connecting from a
machine running Woody with both the Cisco or a WG511 (prism54) cards.

I'm not sure if it's the NetworkManager that's the problem or not.  I
suspect not because if I kill that process (and the applet) and try
and manually configure using iwconfig and ifup the interface I don't
have much better luck.

I don't use WEP or WPA on my AP -- I just don't broadcast my essid
(stops the neighbors from telling my my AP is not secure ;).  But
that shouldn't be a problem.  NetworkManager will often show that it's
"connected" to my AP but dhcp never happens.

It's amazing how much time you can use up swapping wireless cards and
rebooting trying different combinations. ;)

Anyone have debugging tips?


Here's the built-in card:


03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. Unknown device 0024 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Atheros Communications, Inc. Unknown device 0033
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 21
        Memory at edf00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 2
        Capabilities: [50] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/0 Enable-
        Capabilities: [60] Express Legacy Endpoint IRQ 0
        Capabilities: [90] MSI-X: Enable- Mask- TabSize=1


ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"openlan"  Nickname:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:B3:C7:18   
          Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:14 dBm   Sensitivity=1/1  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=13/70  Signal level=-83 dBm  Noise level=-96 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:2  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0



-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org