14.04 - realtek wireless bad, ralink wireless usb far better - why?

[squakie]

My new laptop came with built-in wireless, Realtek RTL8188EE. In Windows 8.1 it runs fine. With Ubuntu 14.04 it works "out of the box", but it's slow and really basically stops at times. It can do N to 150 mbs, and usually connects to the router at that speed. But it is SLOW on the net (it's Comcast broadband). I plugged in a Tenda W322U v2.0 like have so much luck with on my other systems including 14.04. The Tenda is a N 300mbs Ralink adapter. Even when it connects to the router at a slower speed, transversing the internet is extremely more quick - like it should be.

Given that, is there perhaps a different driver for the Realtek RTL8188EE that might work better? Right now it's just using whatever default driver it decided to use at install.

Thanks!

[praseodym]

Try these steps with the Realtek card (updated driver and module parameters:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-headers-generic linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential dkms git
git clone https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver
cd rtl8188ce-linux-driver
make
sudo make install
sudo cp -r firmware/* /lib/firmware
echo "options rtl8188ee ips=0 fwlps=0" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8188ee.conf

Reboot.

[squakie]

Just got a chance to do all of that. So far so good! It seems like everything is loading really quick now and not timing out!

Thanks!

[hypsizigus]

I'm having a similiar probem with the same model computer. I tried the fix but the downoad speed is flucuating, greatly. From near nothing up to 7+ Mbps. Is there a solution to this besides an external card?

[fil_lif]

cheers praseodym, that worked a treat!

[Simon_Woolf]

Also worked for me on a brand new HP Pavilion D006ed - Thanks!

[Simon_Woolf]

Darn, not so fast. I thought this had solved it but it's still sluggish. And if I ping the router, I'm still getting wildly inconsistent results (from 0.8ms to 1,000ms+)

I also tried some of the suggestions here (disabling 802.11-n, disabling IPv6, "fixing" the bug in nsswitch) but nothing works. I'm only getting about half the speed I get on another Ubuntu 14.04 machine (Samsung series 9) connected to the same router.

[SimonHGR]

I apologize if "me too' posts are frowned upon, but the fix in post #2 seems to have fixed this for me too. It's been running nicely for about five hours now, with intermittent "speedtest.net" tests all showing comparable results. Hopefully, what follows might add something for someone...

I had poor connectivity with 13.10, and it got much worse with 14.04. My machine is a Toshiba Satellite S55t-5334. (By the way, the keyboard and touch pad on this model are horrible!)

The fix took this from being prone to intermittent failure of the connection (still showed as connected, but nothing happening, disconnect/reconnect used to fix that) and running at perhaps 2Mbps down and 200Kbps up to running at 25Mbps down and 17Mbps up. In theory, I have 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up from my ISP, but I suspect that the nature of the DSL Modem <--> Wireless N router <--> laptop connections, along with what I already know is a pretty rf-noisy area, means that the 25/17 is a pretty good approximation of "fixed".

I did find initially that the make command failed with lots of errors. I tried changing to the 13.?? (I forget exactly what was offered) "branch" as it questioned after the first failure, but that just failed differently. I tried the 14.04 branch again a second time, which also failed (differently again) and then I did:

make clean

and then went back to "make" with the 14.04 branch and then it worked smoothly. Not sure why that might have been, and didn't take time to investigate. After that make, the rest of the commands worked first time, and the network took a whole giant leap forward. Fingers crossed it stays that way permanently

Vielen Dank, Praseodym, much appreciate your efforts. Do you happen to know if the fixed driver will make it into mainstream/core Ubuntu any time soon?

[foxtochop]

Method on post #2 is working properly on TOSHIBA Satellite Pro C660-27E (Realtek RTL8188CE). Seeding torrents for 48 hours non-stop and no unstability or low speed. Continious 700 to 860 kbps (download) and 70-80 kbps (upload), conected via WiFi.

[SimonHGR]

Small followup:

1) I noticed an error message during startup, which I found in /var/log/apt/term.log it reported:

libkmod: ERROR ../libkmod/libkmod-config.c:686 kmod_config_parse: /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf line 1: ignoring bad line starting with '-e'

When I looked at the file, it started with
------------------
-e


# disable power save options (added by FreedomBen's driver)
options rtl8192ce ips=0
options rtl8192ce fwlps=0
------------------
Which is to say, it had the -e right at the top, a couple of blank lines, then the comment, and after that the options. I copied and pasted the command that created this, so I'm puzzled how it got there. Could easily be my mistake, but in case it's not, I mention it.

2) I noticed yesterday, my connection dropped. It did it twice, both times during extended idle periods. The "wavefront" icon turned into the empty pie-slice, and although I could see other networks, mine was not on the list. My network was still up, and in use by another Linux machine right next to this one (different WiFi hardware). I disabled WiFi, then re-enabled it, and it came right back, auto-connecting for me. Again, possibly spurious information, but hopefully of some merit.

Thanks again for the wonderful work!