Max Pyziur wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Al Thompson wrote:
Well, I FINALLY got wireless working on my Compaq laptop. I never got
the interal Broadcom wlan working, but I got a Belkin USB wirless to
work last night, after months of fiddling with it.
Now I have one related problem: My mouse is also USB, and whenever
there is heavy wireless activity, my mouse doesn't work at all. Is
there a way around this, or is it just the nature of having two USB
devices? I thought there was a way to "reserve" a certain bandwidth
for each device, but can't find anything on it.
Good to hear that someone has had success on this front. I, too, have
been trying to get consistent WiFi results. I've been working with three
different NICs, one USB, the other two PCMCIA.
The one one with which I've been successful has been a Netgear WG111US
Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter. However, its performance has been erratic. I
can successfully connect to my WAP, work for a while, and then the
connection drops. I notice that the device gets especially hot and am
wondering if this is the cause for its eventual failure. Comments?
Heat is the enemy of any electronic device. If its overheating its
probably not much longer for this world, unless you can find a way to
cool it before the damage becomes irreparable.
On the PCMCIA front, I've been testing two cards: an old Linksys WPC111
(only 802.11b) and a Netgear WPNT511.
WPC111:
lcpci does not see the Linksys WPC111, but ifconfig -a does. I can
assign a static IP to the WPC111 and use other commands to configure it
to work with my WAP but I get no throughput.
WPNT511:
lscpi identifies the Netgear WPNT511, but ifconfig -a does not. I have
used ndiswrapper to load the appropriate driver and my results are still
the same.
Everyone always seems to focus on the model of their wireless card. It
is the chipset that matters most.
Finding out which chipset your card has can be a real pain in the ass.
Sometimes the same model cards are manufactured using several different
chipsets on different production runs. Look at the model number and
REVISION on your card and google to determine which chipset you have,
sometimes a serial number can help but it all depends on what info is
available for your card. If your getting partial functionality then
maybe this latest kernel update will do it for you. The HCL lists most
of the compatible chipsets.
If you find your chipset is supported but it isn't working anyway then
maybe a small tweak is all that's needed or to find the right drivers
for it.
-Max
