[ltp] T61 Atheros wireless LED

[Robert T. West ("Tim")]

Thanks for the responses, guys...

> - The signal reception is weak. For example if in Windows it reports 90%
> strength in Ubuntu it will report something like 65-70%.

That's very definitely the case with mine as well. In fact, it mine
was reporting 20% or so less than 3 feet from the router. That's with
a WRT150N, which is admittedly weaker than my old WRT54GL, but Windows
reports it much higher with the exact same hardware, and works pretty
much flawlessly with it (I'm dual-booting for the time being).

> - Some WPA encryptions will not work under Network Manager. But that's
> fixable but not connecting through NM but rather creating your own
> wpa_supplicant script and running it.

I see another research project coming...  ;-) I'm a professional
programmer, but I work far, far from the metal. Just feeling my way
with this stuff.

> - The led won't work. I'm used now and don't really care, I have visual
> software indicators on my screen anyway...

Same here, I also don't really care. It would be nice to have, but I'm
not going to struggle for it.

> But in terms of bandwidth and reliability it's fine... so I wonder if you
> have a different Atheros than me.
> My lspci shows:
> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg
> NIC (rev 01)

I'm going from memory here (Thinkpad is at home), but I remember it
being AR5218, and "n" on the protocols. I got the impression  a few
months ago that the only people reporting much success with this
particular adapter were using ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. It
is PCI-E, and I got the impression that the PCI versions were much
better supported in Linux.

Thanks.

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 5:25 AM, Daniel Castro <castromd@tcd.ie> wrote:
> Tim,
>
> My T61 has an Atheros and it works fairly well.
> Now that I upgraded to 8.04 it works even better. It does have some minor
> issues like:
> - The signal reception is weak. For example if in Windows it reports 90%
> strength in Ubuntu it will report something like 65-70%.
> - Some WPA encryptions will not work under Network Manager. But that's
> fixable but not connecting through NM but rather creating your own
> wpa_supplicant script and running it.
> - The led won't work. I'm used now and don't really care, I have visual
> software indicators on my screen anyway...
>
> But in terms of bandwidth and reliability it's fine... so I wonder if you
> have a different Atheros than me.
> My lspci shows:
> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212 802.11abg
> NIC (rev 01)
>
> ________________________
>
> Daniel Castro
> Networking and Distributed Systems
> Computer Science
> Trinity College Dublin
>
> Mobile: 083-318-2058
> 86.4.3 Trinity Hall, Dartry Road, Dublin 6
> ________________________