Intermittent Airport.

[killabuntu]

Thanks, rsavage, I know that this may not work but I'll give it a go again. I did it in Ubuntu 12.10 with a negative result and I reverted to the original setup with minimal hassle. If this doesn't work and the revert is ok then I'll (hopefully) just be back to where I am now.

It is connecting relatively quickly, usually within 10 minutes of booting up, at least most times.

Thanks and here goes...

[killabuntu]

...And now, rsavage, a great big thank you, the wicd option worked!!!

At least this time I got an interface that I could use, I connected and rebooted (just to be sure it had taken) and it automatically connected.

The instructions I followed last time were different to the ones you gave me this time. The other ones didn't mention the ap_scan thing but edited a different file, can't remember which one it was now.

Anyway, thanks again for your patience with us newbies. I'll post this and mark it solved, Yippeeee!!!!

[2blue]

Good to hear the wireless is finally working. Sometimes it is a bit of a struggle. Luckily rsavage is clever with these things

[killabuntu]

Yes, 2blue, it is good that something worked although I was happy to get a connection the way it was happening before as it was connecting fairly soon after boot up but better to connect straight away, the way it should happen.

And thanks again for your input along the journey, cheers.

[rsavage]

Killabuntu, that is great news!! Is it still working or was it a fluke?!!

You've actually done me a favour by making me investigate wicd more. I've been having multiple problems with network-manager in 12.04 (like this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/965895 ), but wicd seems to be behaving well.

Out of curiosity could you please tell me the ap_scan value you get from these commands:

cat /var/log/syslog | grep ap_scan
cat /var/log/syslog.1 | grep ap_scan

One thing to note is that when wicd gets updated (shouldn't happen very often) your changes will probably get overridden. You may like to take a note of what you did to the misc.py file.

Anyway, I'm glad it worked! If you can confirm it is still working then I'll link the post on the bug report so that others can benefit. Thanks

[rsavage]

One thing that I think lets wicd down are the icons. Luckily it is easy to create new ones!

Attached are the icons I created for xubuntu. They are just the elementary-dark network-manager icons (although I changed the no-signal icon - there are 3 versions of that to choose from). One day I'll be more imaginative and properly make my own!

To install, extract the contents and copy the icon files to

/usr/share/pixmaps/wicd

I've included a script that should help if you want to create your own icons based on your theme.

[killabuntu]

No fluke, rsavage, it is firing up each time, cold boot and restart equally well. Thanks so much for your input and for the icons as well, I'll have a look at them and the script and see if I can come up with something original for mine.

With the output of those commands you asked about, I get no output at all from the first one, is that right??? And for the second one, I get a value of 1 but nothing for yesterday and this morning. I get results for Saturday and Sunday only.

Anyway, it is working and well too as far as I can see and I'm glad that I was able to help you to find something that can be helpful to others as well.

Thanks again and cheers.

[rsavage]

Okay that is all good. Those ap_scan values are from when you were using network-mangager. They confirm that you were hitting the bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/715438 . I've added a comment linking to the wicd workaround. Thanks for making me aware there was still a problem with the Airport Cards. I hate the PowerPC FAQ not having reliable info (I've linked that now too). With your help I think we've now got a good workaround. Cheers

[killabuntu]

I'm stoked that, in some small way, I was able to contribute to the resolution of an issue that probably affects a few people. Of course, the major kudos go to you, rsavage, because you have the knowledge to be able to suggest the right options to try.

Anyway, it's out there now and hopefully many others will benefit, great stuff. And that, folks, is the power of the forums.

[bipa]

Thank you very much for your efforts gentlemen.

After struggling many hours I finally got an Airport classic card connecting from an iMac G3 DV (450 MHz slot-in) under Ubuntu 12.04 using wicd.

However the situation seemed to be quite different for me so I'm adding some comments here about my experience : in case it might help other (?) users of those old machines.

My access point is configured with 128-bit WEP authentication (I know it's a bad thing but that's another story) and I kept getting that infamous authentication failure (e.g. "bad passwd" with wicd) in both networkmanager and wicd. The connection works flawlessly from within MacOS X 10.4.11 "Tiger" BTW, so there is nothing wrong with the hardware itself.

I found a lot of information about the Linux airport/orinoco driver only working with "ap_scan=2", but in fact, even after forcing "ap_scan=2" through rsavage's wicd hack, my Airport still wouldn't authenticate successfully ("wpa authentication may have failed" etc... "bad passwd").

Eventually, it is changing the firmware file /lib/firmware/agere_sta_fw.bin (actually moving it away to make the airport driver revert to the built-in firmware) that made it work. According to driver messages, my Airport card has firmware revision 8.40 built-in : apparently it does not support WPA-PSK, but the 128-bit WEP authentication works (actually I don't even know whether the "ap_scan=2" trick helped or not).

Before that I had tried two other, much more recent, revisions of the firmware : Ubuntu comes with revision 9.48 out-of-the-box, which claims to support WPA-PSK (which I could not test) but would never authenticate with my WEP-128 AP. In the process of trying to fix it, I also used "agere fw utils" to extract the latest firmware from its MacOS X "kext" (revision 9.52, don't know why Ubuntu doesn't provide this one instead of 9.48 btw, since it apparently dates back to 2007). This one seems to load correctly with the airport driver, and also claims WPA-PSK support, but still no luck for WEP-128 authentication.

I have no clue as to the differences between 9.48 and 9.52 but in case anybody wants to try the latest revision, just let me know and I'll e-mail the file or try to upload it somewhere.

My guess is that I'll be stuck again as soon as I'll dump my old WEP-128 setup and switch to a WPA access point authentication... but I have no way to test it at the moment. Maybe by this time I'll have to switch back to the newer firmwares 9.48 or 9.52.

EDIT : After disabling rsavage's wicd hack (so back to "ap_scan=1" I presume), the WEP-128 authentication still works. That's quite puzzling (given all the information about airport requiring this "ap_scan=2" thing) but it looks like my issue was merely due to the more recent firmware revisions (again : 9.48 and 9.52 won't authentitacte with WEP-128 ). There is a hint in the Ubuntu PowerPC FAQ about moving the firmware file out of /lib/firmware to force the driver reverting to the built-in card firmware : I can confirm that it helps a lot (at least with WEP-128 and built-in firmware 8.40). I'd be willing to add a confirmation about this in the FAQ but the wiki does not seem to allow such edits (page is not editable for me). If I ever try with WPA authentication at a later time (which will definitely not work with the old firmware) I'll try to remember to update this thread.