zmatt
The Bulldog
- Messages
- 4,660
- Location
- In an empty Ramen packet
There is a very good reason why I don't update OSX. Apple has a bad habit of breaking things. This time it was my Airport drivers. Now, for a laptop who's main reason for existence relies around note taking and web surfing at coffee shops this simply wont do.
So I install Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid I think. Anyways, the Airport express card (broadcom BCM43xx) was recognized, configured and installed out of the box. Gasp! That's a Linux first for me. Anyways the good feelings soon wore off when I realized the wireless card had a stunted range and kept disconnecting form the router. As I am typing this I am directly one floro above the router. My desktop has a Belkin G card as a backup (Atheros I think) and I have all bars. The powerbook drops the connection every 10 seconds. After every drop it brings the window for the WEP key up. So I'm not sure if this is a range issue, a key rejection issue, or both. Looking at the network manager i start with all bars at bootup and then slowly over the next few minutes loose all of them.
So wtf? Is there a setting somewhere that can alleviate this? Are there some better drivers perhaps? I'm not going back to OSX, Apple had it's chance and screwed me over. I would hate to toss this laptop as the hardware has served me well so far. It seems that it is cursed to run buggy and unstable software though.
So I install Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid I think. Anyways, the Airport express card (broadcom BCM43xx) was recognized, configured and installed out of the box. Gasp! That's a Linux first for me. Anyways the good feelings soon wore off when I realized the wireless card had a stunted range and kept disconnecting form the router. As I am typing this I am directly one floro above the router. My desktop has a Belkin G card as a backup (Atheros I think) and I have all bars. The powerbook drops the connection every 10 seconds. After every drop it brings the window for the WEP key up. So I'm not sure if this is a range issue, a key rejection issue, or both. Looking at the network manager i start with all bars at bootup and then slowly over the next few minutes loose all of them.
So wtf? Is there a setting somewhere that can alleviate this? Are there some better drivers perhaps? I'm not going back to OSX, Apple had it's chance and screwed me over. I would hate to toss this laptop as the hardware has served me well so far. It seems that it is cursed to run buggy and unstable software though.
