Hello ALUG,

How's anyone else's experience with wireless on their Acer Aspire One? I'm running Debian unstable on mine and wireless is quite dodgey.

It's the stock 2.6.26 kernel from unstable along with the madwifi drivers (0.9.4) installed via m-a.

Initially, if I do

$ sudo iwlist scanning

it says:

wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down

it's only after I've done:

$ sudo ifup ath0

that it'll actually search for networks. This doesn't seem right.

This aside, once I've added a suitable configuration to my /etc/network/interfaces it's very reluctant to connect to it.

Normally when I do

$ sudo ifup ath0

the little wifi LED doesn't flash, it waits for 20 seconds or so while it does DHCPDISCOVER a few times and then gives up.

After this iwlist returns no results:

wifi0 Interface doesn't support scanning. ath0 No scan results

Then occasionally it connects. The LED flashes as normal, it connects almost immediately and reconnects without problems after suspend to RAM or shutdowns. Usually I go all day Saturday without it working and then it starts working on Sunday. (During the week I use ordinary ethernet.) But this weekend the wifi elves seem to have forgotten to visit my computer.

I wondered whether being on AC power vs. battery may make a difference but it doesn't seem to. (Thankfully. It'd pretty useless if it needed to be plugged in to connect to a wifi network.)

I also tried installing the 2.6.28 kernel from sidux which has the ath5k drivers in it but that doesn't seem to make any difference either.

Is anyone else finding their's bad? Or is it just me?

Best, Richard

PS. resending after some SMTP error. Apologies if it comes twice!