[GRLUG] wifi connection drops under Ubuntu

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 6:19 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> I bought an Acer Aspire One for my wife.  It came with Win7 Starter
> Edition.  W7SE is a dog.  I installed Ubuntu (full, not Netbook Remix)
> on it.  It is much snappier than Win7.  However, wifi does not work as
> well under Ubuntu as it does under Win7.  Win7 shows signal strength
> around 85% and Ubuntu (NetworkManager) shows it around 42%.  Googling
> has revealed that these figures may not be accurate.  I am inclined to
> trust them since Win7 never experiences loss of network connectivity
> whereas Ubuntu experiences frequent drops.

The actual "quality" measurement isn't so simple as a percentage; the
driver itself will be reporting a signal strength in dB and a noise
strength in dB. Your actual connection quality depends on your
signal-to-noise ratio. That "percentage" is going to be some
calculation based on those two numbers. If you drop into an xterm and
run 'iwconfig (interface)', what does it say?

> I disabled power management
> on the wifi card (thinking that perhaps Ubuntu is mistakenly reducing
> the power to it in an effort to save power).  This does not eliminate
> the loss of connectivity.  I am not sure what else to do, but no matter
> what, I cannot tell my wife to just boot into Windows.  Any ideas?

Watch /var/messages and /var/syslog. There's likely something interesting there.

It's also possible that the Aspire One generates more EMI when running
Ubuntu's drivers and policies than when running Windows' drivers and
policies, based on configuration of the device. It may actually *help*
to be more aggressive on power policies for things like your hard disk
and CPU speed.

-- 
:wq