[wellylug] Enabling Wireless Operation on Acer # 4315 Laptop

[Jethro Carr]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 18:29 +1200, marchetti wrote:
> Came with Ubuntu 7.1, now 8.04. After this upgrading, more
> by good luck than management, I managed to get the wireless
> operation going. Duh, I should have taken notes. Recently I
> had to reinstall 8.04 (I accidentally started a media player
> during a downloading/application of updates, and I suspect
> one of the updates involved the kernel or something else
> important - result was a repetitive soft lock up).
> 
> Having reinstalled, I checked the network manager icon and
> found I could only connect to a wired connection (there was
> no searching for wireless networks as there was previously,
> with the overlapping monitors icon changing to two rotating
> globes, then a signal strength indicator). I then checked
> under Hardware Drivers, Proprietary Drivers, one of which
> was support for Atheros 802.11 wireless LAN cards - enabled
> (ticked) - status (ticked) in use. I then sniffed around in
> Network and Network Tools, but to no avail. Made no progress
> in Ubuntu Help either, but did not persevere there, though,
> as I did not feel comfortable with sudo command strokes.
> 
> Even before the above accident, I had noticed some
> reluctance, on occasions, of the Acer's wireless electronics
> to connect to any wireless router, be it my home one, or
> say, CafeNet.
> 
> I take this is probably because the Acer's wireless may be
> optimised for Windows, but not to hot operating with other
> OS...

Most likely a driver issue - there are two ways to make Atheros chipsets
work:
1. Use the older madwifi driver.
2. Use the newer ath5k driver included in Ubuntu.

Sometimes the newer ath5k driver doesn't work properly but switching to
the older madwifi driver will resolve the problem.

I've seen other weirdness in the past as well.... for example, my
laptop's atheros card will refuse to work reliably in 802.11g mode, and
has latencies of up to 5 seconds and packet drops of about 20%. Locking
it to 802.11b fixed the problem and it works fine at that.

Either myself or one of the other installfest team members will be able
to take a look and sort it out for you on Saturday. :-)


> I am bringing the PC to the Installfest, but is there an
> easy solution I can implement now? The other thing I would
> like help with is codec installation for DVD playing.

Haven't set up DVD playback on Ubuntu since 6.06, but the way you could
do it back then was to:

sudo -s
apt-get install libdvdread3
cd /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples
./install-css.sh

I suspect that will still be the case with 8.04.


regards,
jethro

-- 
Jethro Carr
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog
www.amberdms.com
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