Ken53
October 17th, 2008, 06:48 PM
With some difficulty, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my Dell Latitude D600 laptop and even got wireless working, but it's extremely slow. In Windows XP (I have a dual-boot setup) a recent test at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1 showed 2262 Kb/s download, 1049 Kb/s upload. Minutes later, running Ubuntu (same location), the wireless rate was 254 Kb/s download, 442 Kb/s upload. It hurts to say this, but as a percentage of Windows speed that's 11% download, 42% upload. I realize that rate depends on many factors, but I've been trying this several days and those results are pretty representative.
In Terminal, lspci gives the following on the card
02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
Memory at fafee000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
and iwconfig wlan0 gives
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"OSU_Access"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:0B:86:E7:E1:02
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Link Quality=56/100 Signal level=-65 dBm Noise level=-69 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
I tried using iwconfig to change the Bit Rate to everything from 2 Mb/s to 54 Mb/s. None helped. In many tries (even with rates iwconfig accepted), it took several tries to actually change the rate parameter. In some cases, performance even deteriorated.
I did not use ndiswrapper to install the wireless driver. Installation from the 8.04 CD apparently provided the driver, sans firmware, which I got using b43-fwcutter (see http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware).
As you can probably tell from my post, I'm new to Linux and not current on system admin and find this all pretty confusing. I would appreciate help with this problem.
In Terminal, lspci gives the following on the card
02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
Subsystem: Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI Card
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
Memory at fafee000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
and iwconfig wlan0 gives
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"OSU_Access"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:0B:86:E7:E1:02
Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=27 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Link Quality=56/100 Signal level=-65 dBm Noise level=-69 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
I tried using iwconfig to change the Bit Rate to everything from 2 Mb/s to 54 Mb/s. None helped. In many tries (even with rates iwconfig accepted), it took several tries to actually change the rate parameter. In some cases, performance even deteriorated.
I did not use ndiswrapper to install the wireless driver. Installation from the 8.04 CD apparently provided the driver, sans firmware, which I got using b43-fwcutter (see http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware).
As you can probably tell from my post, I'm new to Linux and not current on system admin and find this all pretty confusing. I would appreciate help with this problem.