Months ago, soon after installing Gutsy Gibbon, I found that my wireless card initially worked well. But a few minutes later, my connection was dead, and I could only restore it by unloading the iwl4965 driver, reloading it, and reconnecting to my access point. Unfortunately, after an indeterminite amount of time the problem would reoccur.
I experimented a little and discovered that by instructing my wireless router to accept anything only 802.11g, the problem vanished. When away from home and using other wireless networks, occasionally my connection would spuriously disconnect. Fortunately, the wireless networks I usually frequent somehow never cause this bug to manifest.
Yesterday my wireless connection was unbearably flaky, and several times, even reloading the driver proved fruitless. I finally decided to look for a proper solution.
Typing dmesg revealed that every time the connection dropped, a message similar to the following would be logged:
[ 154.652000] wlan0: No ProbeResp from current AP 04:11:46:fe:24:b0 - assume out of rangeGoogling for "iwl4965 no proberesp" shows that many others have had the same trouble. Some pages were unanswered bug reports, and others contained discussion where the consensus was to reload the kernel module as a workaround. Happily, before long I stumbled across a FAQ for the ThinkPad T61 that describes a permanent fix, which I'll repeat:
- Download the latest iwlwifi microcode
- Replace /lib/firmware/2.6.22-14-generic/iwlwifi-4965-1.ucode.
- Reload iwl4965 module
Now I'm left with one remaining significant complaint: the graphics driver. My i965 mostly behaves but there are minor annoyances involving compiz, and major ones involving Wine. I'll leave this for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment