jhofmann
April 19th, 2007, 04:06 PM
Problem: The built-in wifi adapter (Inter PRO/Wireless 2915BCA) wasn't working well at home. Worked fine around town with other Access Points, but not with the home AP. On the other hand, a Linksys WPC11 Ver 3 worked out of the box perfectly.
Error Messages: About every 20 seconds /var/log/messages shows ipw2200: detected firmware error. Restarting.
Ping to a wired computer on the home network running about 25-50% packet loss, average time 150-300 ms over a one minute period.
Completely unusable behavior.
Much googling turned up Error 800 from Bugzilla, but no solution, and I couldn't find any recent work on the problem. Intel suggested darkly "timing errors causing frame dropping".
Here's where the System 76 part comes, maybe.
Solution: Found the "antenna" option in modinfo output. It says there are 4 settings
0 is default, both antennas; 1 is main antenna only; 2 is something called Slow_Diversity; and 3 is Aux antenna.
Carefully trying each option by using modprobe ipw2200 antenna=N, I learned that when antenna=3 results were just as good for the intel 2915 as they were for the Linksys pcmcia card, and in any case excellent. Ping results now 0% lost packets, average time 2.28 ms over the same 1-minute interval.
I suppose this is all just informational, but if anyone has input I'd like to read it. What does the solution have to do with the problem, for instance?
Jim.
Error Messages: About every 20 seconds /var/log/messages shows ipw2200: detected firmware error. Restarting.
Ping to a wired computer on the home network running about 25-50% packet loss, average time 150-300 ms over a one minute period.
Completely unusable behavior.
Much googling turned up Error 800 from Bugzilla, but no solution, and I couldn't find any recent work on the problem. Intel suggested darkly "timing errors causing frame dropping".
Here's where the System 76 part comes, maybe.
Solution: Found the "antenna" option in modinfo output. It says there are 4 settings
0 is default, both antennas; 1 is main antenna only; 2 is something called Slow_Diversity; and 3 is Aux antenna.
Carefully trying each option by using modprobe ipw2200 antenna=N, I learned that when antenna=3 results were just as good for the intel 2915 as they were for the Linksys pcmcia card, and in any case excellent. Ping results now 0% lost packets, average time 2.28 ms over the same 1-minute interval.
I suppose this is all just informational, but if anyone has input I'd like to read it. What does the solution have to do with the problem, for instance?
Jim.