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
On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 17:34 +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
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?
I am running mine on Ubuntu 8.10's stock kernel and the ath5k drivers and it seems to work pretty well..My wifi light is dead but otherwise they work.
On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 17:34 +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
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.
Sorry for such a late reply on this but at the time you posted I did not have any similar hardware and now I do. Is the Apsire One the netbook?
Anyway I now have a netbook, a Toshiba NB100 which came pre-installed with Ubuntu 8.04.1 and which also uses Atheros wireless hardware, maybe even the same chipset - at least the driver looks the same.
When I first tried to get it to connect to my wireless network (which uses WPA) it would not do so and also seemed to forget the WPA key.
Subsequently I have discovered the Networking Applet that offers to do the setting up is the GNOME applet for NetworkManager which is doing the work in the background.
The applet is able to make the hardware scan for access points because I get a graphical list with signal strength and I am able to choose mine by ESSID but that is as far as it would get - it would not connect.
After that I discovered that if I added the WPA key to the /etc/network/interfaces file and ran:
$ ifdown ath1 $ ifup ath1
it would associate with the access point and it started working correctly. This needs to be done at every boot so I have added these lines to my rc.local file, meanwhile I have filed a Ubuntu bug for network manager: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/343962
The kernel is a Ubuntu one - 2.6.24-19-lpia
HTH, Steve.
On Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:44:26 +0000 Steve Fosdick lists@pelvoux.nildram.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 17:34 +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
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.
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.
Several sites reported problems with the ath5k driver which is why I chose the ath_pci madwifi drivers - though I confess I didn't test the ath5k. I went for the kuki kernel because it helps to get everything else (including sound) working. There are known (and reported) bugs in the wired ethernet connection with kernel 2.6.27-11. It works if you go back to 2.6.27-7, but other things like sound then break.
The only thing I can't get to work now is memory sticks (or memory stick pro) in the right hand card reader, sd cards work fine for me.
Battery life is a tad disappointing though. I'm getting just over 2 hours so far.
Oh, and a blue xubuntu desktop on a blue AAO looks really cool...
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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:
1. Restore the machine from the CD that came with it.
2. 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.
Regards, Steve.
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.
On Wed, 2009-03-18 at 14:37 +0000, Steve Fosdick wrote:
- 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.
I have been running Ibex on my AAO for some time now..I meant to post the other night but got distracted.
The only problems I have are intermittent suspend resume (they actually vanish from the gnome shutdown menu) and non functional wireless led's (although the wifi kill switch still operates)..oh and I am avoiding the latest kernel updates as apparently they break the ethernet connection.
Glad to hear that the next version of ubuntu works as well if not better on your hardware...makes me feel better about trying it on mine this weekend.
Has anyone tried Crunchbang Linux on any of the netbooks ? http://crunchbanglinux.org/
-
mick -
Richard Lewis -
Steve Fosdick -
Wayne Stallwood