[TriLUG] Is My Wireless Card Bad?

David McDowell turnpike420 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 28 23:04:19 EDT 2005


Yup, if you have the ipw2200, see this:
http://www.turnpike420.net/linux/Ubuntu_notes.txt

These wonderful notes I have are courtesy of Daniel's instruction!! 
:)  For the short time that I was using Ubuntu on my T42 (I've gone to
CentOS 4.1 at the moment due to my "lack of debian based distro
knowledge") the wifi seemed to work just fine.  With the default
Ubuntu 5.04 ipw2200 driver, I was having problems, but they may have
been solely related to my WRT54G needing a switch kick in the a$$ and
not the driver/firmware version, but I had updated the driver before
fixing the AP, so hard to say.  Currently things are working
beautifully after fixing the WRT54G and installing the driver/firmware
in my CentOS 4.1 installation... WEP is also working without any
troubles:
http://www.turnpike420.net/linux/ipw2200.txt

If you don't have ipw2200, you might share what wifi card/chipset you
have so the list has more detail to help you, just as the other David
suggested.  :)

good luck!  :)
David McD


On 6/28/05, David Rasch <rasch at raschnet.com> wrote:
> 
> Randy,
> 
> What chipset is your wireless interface?  There are several of us with
> Thinkpad T42's and use the ipw2200 driver under ubuntu and have each
> complained about similar symptoms at one time or another.  I know that
> David McD compiled a new driver/firmware for his system.  He'll have to
> report on its reliability.
> 
> -David
> 
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:44:25PM -0400, Randall Barlow <rpbarlow at ncsu.edu> wrote:
> > I've been having a strange issue with the wireless network connection on
> > my laptop.  As you can tell from some of my recent posts, I recently
> > switched my laptop to Ubuntu from Windows.  The primary problem that
> > stimulated the move was that I could not get my wireless card to stay
> > connected to our home network, or any network for that matter.  It had
> > been working for about 10 months with no problems before this, and all
> > of a sudden it crapped out.  I tried reinstalling the driver, and
> > nothing seemed to fix the problem.
> >
> > So I switched to Ubuntu, and it worked... for a while.  Now I'm having
> > similar problems again.  If I reboot the machine, it will connect to my
> > home router (using WEP).  After a while (could be 5 minutes, could be 2
> > hours) it will lose the connection, and I won't be able to get it to
> > connect to any network (not even any of my neighbors unencrypted
> > routers) unless I reboot the computer (shutdown, power on because Ubuntu
> > won't reboot for some reason, a whole other problem altogether).
> >
> > Something interesting to me is that I can still use iwlist to see the
> > access points in the area, including the one that I want to connect to.
> > Here is that iwconfig returns when the connection is working:
> >
> > eth0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"BETA"
> >          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.447 GHz  Access Point: 00:09:5B:E9:90:A8
> >          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
> >          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
> >          Power Management:off
> >          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level=-35 dBm  Noise level=-88 dBm
> >          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
> >          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
> >
> > And when it's not:
> >
> > eth0      unassociated  ESSID:"BETA"
> >          Mode:Managed  Channel=0  Access Point: 00:00:00:00:00:00
> >          Bit Rate=0 kb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm
> >          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
> >          Power Management:off
> >          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
> >          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
> >          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0
> >
> >    So, any ideas of what the problem could be?  My suspicion is
> > hardware failure only because I was having similar problems before in
> > Windows.  Is there any way to test if this is the problem?  The computer
> > is still under warranty from Best Buy, so I could take it to them, but I
> > suspect they'll say, "Linux, what?" and attribute the problem to that
> > and be done with it.  Any advice or experience here?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Randy Barlow who's sorry for the high volume of posts to the list he's
> > made lately
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> 
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> 
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