At Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:37:24 +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 21:41 +0000, mick wrote:
Having just invested in an Aspire One I can now add to that.
I'm running xubuntu (8.10) with the kuki (sickboy) 2.6.28 kernel and madwifi drivers and the wireless is rock solid. I even have the wireless LEDs working. I'm getting consistent transfer rates of 600-720 KB/s in file transfer on my local (54Meg) wireless connection.
I've just found the first "Gotcha!" with my netbook.
It appears the kernel and modules have been split into several packages including some variants specifically for the netbook and some with proprietary drivers and, in Ubuntu 8.04 at least, the dependencies are not complete.
The result of this is that when update manager (synaptic) offered to installs some updates and I accepted it then installed a new kernel and left a non matching set of modules which meant that then the sound stopped working because the driver for the sound hardware would not load.
I checked the APT cache and looked on the Ubuntu website but could not find a matching set of kernel and modules. The two options appeared to be:
Restore the machine from the CD that came with it.
Install Jaunty (nightly build, today 18-Mar-2009).
The first is slightly complicated by the fact that the manufacturer (Toshiba in this case) supply a recovery CD, but the netbook has no CD drive. I am wondering if copying the CD (with dd) to a USB flash key would work.
The second option looked interesting and it seemed I had nothing to lose so I tried it. So far this seems to be a success. The sound works again and the wireless networking works correctly with NetworkManager with no need for the work around I mentioned in my last message and the (wireless) performance seems as good as before but this time using free rather than proprietary drivers. Suspend/resume seems to work too and the wireless works again after resume.
Out of interest, my wireless started working again last weekend through no effort on my part. Either I upgraded something without noticing or it's just dodgy and will work intermittently.
Thanks for your pointers, though.