[gNewSense-users] Re: Wifi trouble (Lemote Yeelong)

[Daniel Clark]

Mikel L. Forcada wrote:
> Hi, it's me again.
> 
> I have a Lemote Yeelong running gNewSense. Everything is up to date. I
> added the wicd repository to /etc/apt/sources.list as shown in
> http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Projects/GNewSenseToMIPS and installed wicd to
> subsitute network-manager.
> 
> I can only get a good Wi-fi connection if I am very close to the access
> point. When I move away, perhaps 5 m away,  even if I get a good signal,
> I get "No route to host" when I ping.  With other wireless devices I can
> connect perfectly from anywhere in the house.
> 
> Has anyone experienced this problem? Is there a workaround?

You can try getting a:

Alfa Network 802.11g High Power Wireless USB Adapter Model AWUS036H

(I think about $40 now)

Initial testing shows it performs much better than the internal RTL8187b
(it is also RTL8187 based, but higher power and with a better antenna),
and also better than other no-binary-blobs external devices such as
other RTL8187-based devices and the Linksys RAlink RA2500USB device.

This is with the out-of-linux-tree RTL8197b driver Lemote recommends
using in preference to the in-linux-tree driver (note that with this
driver, the module is "r8187", not "rtl8187"). You'll need to comment 2
lines in the source to avoid a lot of messages spewing to the console
about high power Rx mode being in effect (just comment out the printk,
which spans 2 lines); I'll be getting this information up on the
RmsLinuxForYou or another page on the config.fsf.org wiki sometime soon.

-- 
Daniel JB Clark   | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation
pobox.com/~dclark | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny

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