Wireless (again)

[max]

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