Wireless reception very weak

English Network/Internet
#1

Hi,

Lornix helped me out a couple of weeks ago configuring the wireless drivers on my IBM Thinkpad.

Everything works well when I’m sitting on top of my wireless router. When I go into another room, or gosh forbid, try to connect to the University’s wireless signal, it fails. I know the signal is there because when I restart and boot up Vista, I can easily connect to the wireless signal.

Any advice on this?

Thanks,

AK

#2

hi,

i’ve been having this problem also.

i was happy that openSUSE 11.1rc1 made my laptop’s built-in RTL8187 wireless work(special thanks to the developers) since i cant make it work in 11.0.

but, comparing the signal strength and quality of signals received by this wireless device on XP and Ubuntu8.04 there was around 15 to 20% reduction of signal strength received using openSUSE.

just by sitting next to my wireless router i get around 83% signal strength when in fact running the other 2 OSes above yields 100%.

this is my first time using this distro and i would like to keep this as my main OS. but i have been looking for some clues or possible answers for days know and still have’nt found one. :frowning:

any help or advice is appreciated.

thanks

#3

lazaruz9 wrote:
> hi,
>
> i’ve been having this problem also.
>
> i was happy that openSUSE 11.1rc1 made my laptop’s built-in RTL8187
> wireless work(special thanks to the developers) since i cant make it
> work in 11.0.
>
> but, comparing the signal strength and quality of signals received by
> this wireless device on XP and Ubuntu8.04 there was around 15 to 20%
> reduction of signal strength received using openSUSE.
>
> just by sitting next to my wireless router i get around 83% signal
> strength when in fact running the other 2 OSes above yields 100%.
>
> this is my first time using this distro and i would like to keep this
> as my main OS. but i have been looking for some clues or possible
> answers for days know and still have’nt found one. :frowning:

The output reported by the RTL8187 for signal and quality is pure garbage even
though it is based on the vendor’s driver. I’m currently working on improving
the numbers, but even so, the values will be arbitrary. The only thing you can
hope is that a smaller quality means a weaker signal. That was not tru with the
vendor’s code for the RTL8187B.

Many other wireless devices have the same problem as most chips do not provide a
“signal strength” or “quality” output. Some do, but not the Realtek devices.

Larry

#4

Thanks, Larry, for the reply.

I’ve been testing the RC1 GNOME and the 2 OSes which are also installed on my laptop with different wireless connections(2 in the office work and 2 at home).

At a reasonable distance from the wireless device where the 2 OSes easily connected to the network with around 30 to 45% signal strength, openSUSE’s 11.1rc1 NetworkManager says it found the wireless router with 20% signal strength but was not able to connect to it.
Am I correct to say, that even if the numbers(signal strength) does not mean anything, it sure affects the performance of the device?

thanks again. :smiley:

#5

I’m glad to see there is some discussion on this. It’s a horrible problem that prohibits one from actually using OpenSuse on a portable machine. I keep installing new Linux releases in hope that this problem has been fixed, but after a couple of days, I end up shoving Vista back on the box just because I need to have wireless connectivity anywhere there is a wireless signal, which in some cases, can be quite weak.

Thanks and look forward to the day when OpenSuse can compete with Windows when it comes to wireless networks.

AK