vakkotaur | Entries tagged with wireless

I am not mining coal, nor do I have a canary. What I do have is a house with electric wiring, some of which might charitably be called 'vintage' and a TRENDnet wireless access point. This combination gave us trouble (or at least me - since I do not have an unlimited data plan on my phone, so I go wifi or nothing unless I specifically turn on mobile networking). I found I would need to re-set the wireless access point often. It might be fine for a day or so, or it might fall over several times a day. This was, of course, quite annoying. What good is a network that doesn't network?

At first I blamed the TRENDnet device as it was the thing that was falling down constantly. Eventually I got so annoyed with it I looked at replacing it outright or even using a computer with a USB wifi gimmick as my own wireless access point. I didn't go that far, but did get sufficiently irked to move the thing into the office (from the living room) where at least I could more easily reset it. And then it worked. And worked. And kept on working - for a couple weeks solid. That indicates the canary, er, TRENDnet device itself isn't the problem, but something was causing it to fail.

There are only two cables going to the device: power and network. And then I recalled two things. One was that we had a lot of wifi failures when a tree branch was brushing up against a power line and when it finally caused a power outage and was dealt with, the wifi worked well again. That pointed to power quality problem. The other was that the problem might be in the house, as with a charred outlet that at least failed open and didn't start a fire. That had me concerned enough to consider rewiring, but first I would inspect everything on that living room circuit.

The inspection took a bit as there were more outlets and light switches on that circuit than we had recorded (or I read the notebook wrong...) and I found a couple things I wasn't entirely happy about. One was a simple re-doing of a workable, but sloppy, connection. The other was an outlet that felt like it was going come apart. That one got replaced. Only then did I feel it was safe to re-energize that circuit. Due to my work and sleep schedule and how wiped I've been feeling since an illness (bad cold?) this took a few days.

Yesterday I finally moved the access point back to the living room. The wireless setup has been working solid for over 14 hours as I write this. That's no guarantee off success - it's lasted a day or two there before. But it is a hopeful since failure within 12 hours had been the norm. I think I'll know in a week or two for sure. And even if that outlet wasn't the problem, I am glad to have replaced it.

Just to be sure, I've disconnected everything but lights from the suspect circuit. After the wifi has proven itself solid, I plan to re-connect things one at a time, over several days, just in case it was some other device causing trouble.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Groovie Goolies (Spirits of '76) - Be Kind to Monsters Week

I'd been looking at getting a USB and possibly wireless headset for a while, so that I could use Skype (or similar, perhaps) and also listen to stuff in the office without it bugging Jay. Last week a deal came up and a Logitech ClearChat headset (refurbished). For $40 (shipped), rather than $100 I decided to go for it. It arrived this Wednesday and I tried it. I had an issue or two. But those have been resolved now.

My first issue was not with the headset itself with PulseAudio (the audio control program that *buntu, amongst other Linux distributions, uses). I'm sure it made sense to the designers, but it's awkward to seem to have duplicates of controls in a few places. And while it is understandable that a control for a specific program will only appear when that program is needing it, the lack of persistence of a control makes things confusing and can mean lots of hunting when there isn't much time - such as the test recording time for Skype. Getting audio to the headset was not a big problem, though I think it should have been slightly easier. When I later went thorugh this on the laptop it went fast, but only because I'd had considerable practice on the desktop.

The second issue was with the headset, or so it seemed. Any attempt to record audio was met with lots of harsh static on the recording. Muting the microphone stoped that but defeated the purpose of the microphone. Rather than fight that, I simply used the headset only for listening for much of the night. It was very easy to get used to not being physically tethered - and not needing to use the phone as a streaming device.

Figuring I might need to boot into Windows (a thing I'd rather avoid, as Windows now makes my skin crawl), I moved the setup to the laptop, caspian and tried again. To my surprise, after the fiddling about with PulseAudio, everything worked. I could hear things on the headset, I could speak and not get static from the microphone. That was with the USB 'dongle' plugged directly into the computer and with it plugged into the Logitech-supplied extension cable. I had a rather long Skype conversation that more than proved that everything worked. And this without any reboot at all.

I finally took the setup back to belgian and didn't use Logitech's cable and... things worked, sort of. The dongle was plugged into the front of the machine and the recorded audio had some rushing in it. With the cable, I got the static back. But that port is connected inside the case by a fairly thin cable to the motherboard. Moving the cable to the back of the machine and plugging that into a USB port right on the motherboard, all was suddenly well. No static hash. No rushing noise. It was acting as well as the laptop had.

I now have a properly working wireless headset arrangement. I'd like to get another extension cable with the nice base for the dongle so that if/when I move things between machines I only need to move the dongle and not the cable as well.

There was no manual with the headset, and I really didn't need one. No special drivers were needed (and disks with drivers or other software seem to be only for Windows, and maybe Mac, anyway) and I didn't need to read more silly warnings of "Don't be an idiot" written by lawyers. A sheet that listed what the light on the dongle meant would have been nice, but that was worked out as well:

Off        - No power to dongle; Headset won't work.
Slow blink - No wireless connection (Headset is off or out of range)
Solid      - Good wireless connection
Fast blink - Headset needs to be charged soon.

Nice features of the headset:

Moving the mic. boom up mutes it.
Pressing the right earpiece mutes & unmutes the mic. when the boom is down.
An LED on the mic. indicates that it is muted.

Almost:
There are volume UP/DOWN buttons on the right earpiece. Unfortunately I have yet to manage to get those to affect the headset volume. They can affect system speaker volume, but that's the wrong thing. Fortunately the setting is usually "set & forget" so this isn't a significant issue once levels are right.

One possible issue for extended use is that the speakers are a bit smaller than the ears, so these are not circumaural nor "intra-aural" like earphones, but supra-aural. The result is that there is some pressure on the outer ear that can cause some discomfort with extended wear. I can see springing for the bigger circumaural design if one expected to use the headset for several hours a day, most days.

Current Mood: pleased

I'm finally installing Wolvix 1.1.0 on the laptop, after getting the latest GParted beta and repartitioning the laptop drive. All that is going slow, but it is going. And the Wolvix LiveCD even found a neighbor's unsecured wireless network and connected without my having to tweak anything.

I also tried Xubuntu. Or rather I tried to try it, and found it wouldn't boot. Evidently I have the hardware that reveals a nasty kernel bug in the latest Ubuntu. So much for trying that.

But the real downer is that I went looking to see if anyone managed to get the Cisco Aironet 350 working with WPA under Linux. Nobody has. A few, at least, have tried. Including a network engineer who knows from Linux and Cisco. Evidently the Aironet can do WPA if it has very recent firmware. Firmware that evidently doesn't work with the Linux driver, but only with the @$&! Windows driver... which doesn't work under ndiswrapper. Which means the card is not sufficiently supported to be fully useful. It's good enough for hotels and such, but that's it.

Anyone know of a wireless card (PCMCIA) with the following characteristics?:

1. Works under Linux natively (no ndiswrapper games).
2. Does WPA right out of the box.
3. Is inexpensive.

It looks like I get to go hunting for such a thing.

Current Mood: disappointed

Wolvix 1.1.0 has been out of beta for a while now and I finally got around to giving it a try in the LiveCD version on the laptop (Compaq Armada 7800, PII-266 192 MB RAM) and while it seems to work much like the installed 1.0.5 does there are a couple places where it doesn't work. One is sound, which isn't a big deal. While it would be nice to have sound, I seldom use it on the laptop and could do without it if need be. The other is WPA (which 1.0.5 doesn't do at all, at least not without lots of hoop-jumping) for wireless.

It's not that wireless doesn't work. Oh, no. Once I tell the system which ethernet interface to use, it will happily find a neighbor's unsecured network and use it, even if I don't tell it to go looking - though I can tell it to stop that and it will. What it won't do, as far as I can tell so far, is connect to the AirPort Express using WPA. Searching the web for solutions doesn't get my hopes up when I see a page proclaiming that Linux and the AirPort Express is a combination that doesn't work, even if he was trying to do more than simply connect. I knew it was time to take a break when I read "macoshints" as "masochist."

I am even starting to consider the use of Jay's older Apple laptop (12 inch PowerBook G4) as Apple stuff talks to Apple stuff just fine, of course. There are a few things holding me back on that, or at least making me nervous. I'd have to see about a proper trackball (the PowerBook will use an external pointer, but only via USB). I'd have to see what it would take to talk to the Canon PowerShot S410, which I suspect might not be too much. And then the thing really has me hesitating: Would I be stuck with Steve Job's idea of how things must look, complete with retina-searing white-hot backgrounds, or could I fix things to have a much more soothing experience?

I have installed Wolvix on percheron where it works quite well, but percheron isn't a laptop. It has a wired network connection and sound "just worked."

Current Mood: frustrated

( More on WiFi-Radar )

Current Mood: pleased

Perserverance or cussed stubbornness?

( Details )

Current Mood: geeky

This past weekend I installed SaxenOS on percheron. Now that I think of it, it didn't give me a chance to name the machine myself, but that's a minor issue. SaxenOS uses the Equinox Desktop Environment which seems to be a light clean thing. I've tried the SaxenOS LiveCD on the laptop and EDE is fairly snappy there as well.

Much of what I would add to customize the installation to my preferences is already there. As Gslapt is included, adding a few things is quite easy. The most difficult installation was Opera, as it had to be done without Gslapt, and that wasn't too big a deal.

So far, SaxenOS was looking really good. It fell down in a couple places, though. Sound wasn't working. The configuration tools that want the root password don't seem to handle it right and so changes can only be done when logged in as root, not as a user who knows how to get to root. The install to hard drive doesn't set the filesystem to read-write so the first thing to do after the install is use the LiveCD to rescue the install. This a known bug and the solution is on the SaxenOS web site.

When I tried the LiveCD on the laptop, I had about the same experience. I didn't install anything, of course, as I was just running from the CD. SaxenOS does mount any hard drive partitions it finds so I didn't have to fiddle around doing that myself. Again the sound didn't work, but that's not too surprising on a laptop. Unfortunately the network card also wasn't working, which was disappointing as I really wanted to try WiFi Radar. That looks like the very thing I was looking for a while ago and was surprised nobody had already written. Well, someone had written it, but all my searches somehow completely missed it.

So far SaxenOS looks pretty good, but it's not quite done. For a while it looked like I might want to replace Ultima with SaxenOS on the laptop. If that should happen, it won't be with the current release.

I did get WiFi Radar to install and run, or appear to run, on Ultima, but I have yet to get it to handle the wireless connection. Hopefully I can find whatever it is I'm overlooking and get it truly working without too much pain. I'd really like to have graphic connection manager and not have to fiddle with the more hands-on stuff every time I change locations.

As percheron is now meant for trying various distributions, I'm not sure how long SaxenOS will last on it. I suspect I'll be trying SaxenOS again, when there is another release.

I've had trouble with wireless networking since starting to use, or try to use, it. The first, I thought, turned out to be an issue with the wireless router at home. With that working, I expected there wouldn't be too much trouble getting wireless working other places such as at hotels. Wrong. I've had exactly zero success with wireless networking other than at home.

Worse, my last attempt to get wireless working elsewhere seems to have broken it for me at home. This is all command line, and while I am not opposed to that, I don't see why much of this needs to be. At the very least, I suspect there is a nice graphical tool whose name I do not yet know what will at least allow the saving of profiles for different locations, if not help with getting them going. That way at least I could (more) easily revert to a working setup at home.

I am assuming something so useful exists as it makes far too much sense for it not to. But my searches haven't turned up anything. Maybe I'm using the wrong search terms. Or else this is one of those glaring deficiencies that needs to be remedied in the Linux world.

So, is there such a thing for linux? And not something utterly dependent upon KDE or GNOME? If it matters, the distribution is a Slackware variant and my window manager is XFCE.

Current Mood: irritated

At Penguicon I tried to get the laptop to recognize the wireless network without any luck. It wasn't too big a deal as it turned out the wireless networking wasn't free and the wired networking was. But it did mean I didn't get to see how to make wireless networking work someplace other than at home.

A couple days ago jmaynard set up the Apple AirPort Express he bought and put in place of a D-Link wireless router. After that, I had to check to see that the laptop would work with it okkay. That was a simple tweak with iwconfig which worked right off. This actually surprised me, because using iwconfig at the Penguicon hotel seemed not to work at all. The settings seemingly refused to change. I even copied the config file I use at home and hand-edited it to try get things to work. I'm still not sure what went wrong.

I know I need to run a script to make the system restart networking with new settings, and I did that. It tried, but then gave up. What should have happened as that iwconfig would make the changes I told it (a new essid, and I think something else), I'd run the (re)start script, the connection would establish, and I could open a browser and get a redirect to tell me how to use (and in that case how to pay for) the connection.

Before leaving Fairmont, I made a point of copying the Slackware help web page that talked about getting wireless networking going. It helped some, but not enough to be successful. Did I RTFM? Yes. TFM didn't get the job done.

I'm not sure what I did wrong, or if I did anything wrong. This bothers me as I plan to take the laptop with me to RCFM and I'd like to have it connected there. The RCFM hotel has free wireless,and does not have wired accessI'm wondering if there was one setting I missed or just what happened. Obviously wireless networking can work, or I'd have no connection at home. And it can work 'on the road' or there'd be plenty of complaints on the web about the problem. And instructions on work-arounds, most likely. What I need is a real beginner's guide that goes through things step by tedious step (not "configure the work, connect" but all the fiddly steps beneath) so I can see what it is that I'm missing. I suspect I was just one "obvious" setting away from things working.