[GRLUG] wifi connection drops under Ubuntu

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 07:20:38PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 6:58 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 06:41:38PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> >> 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?
> >
> > root at djr-laptop:~# iwconfig wlan0
> >          Link Quality=26/70  Signal level=-84 dBm
[snip]
> > [ 1927.216729] ath9k: DMA failed to stop in 10 ms AR_CR=0x00000024 AR_DIAG_SW=0x40000020
> 
> Sounds like the ath9k driver is having problems?

Yes, that was the problem.  I upgraded linux-backports-modules-karmic and
linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic.  The netbook is now
showing ~80% signal strength.

As a bonus I switched to WPA since I realized I posted my WEP key and
SSID.  :-)

Thanks to all who responded.  It got me thinking and helped to narrow my
googling.  Here is the thread that helped me:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1309605&highlight=AR928X
-- 
john-thomas
------
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Margaret Thatcher