New Pandora

[paulguy]

So I just got my pandora and really have been having a hell of a time with the wireless on it. Basically, this is the story.

NetworkManager doesn't do a thing, encryption or not, tried different routers. It just never ever connects.

So, I'm using wpa_supplicant and a small shellscript that calls ifconfig and route for me to set up the IP and whatnot. This works OK, except when it doesn't.

The wireless will generally connect without an issue, but the matter is for how long. It seems to stay up for a long time for really slow bandwidth stuff, like, less than maybe 20-30KB/s (chatting, secure shell, low bitrate audio). What makes it crap itself is high bandwidth stuff. Like, I can get up to 350KB/s that I've measured, which is what my internet provides, but this will only last for maybe a few seconds before the connection drops completely, and needs to be toggled off then on.

So basically, what I'd like is some recommendations for USB dongles. I know there's compatibility lists and stuff, but these things tend to be finnicky and I might end up with something worse than what I have, so I'd like to hear from anyone who has specific experience with these, specifically in linux. I doubt this is a driver thing, because I haven't heard of this happening for anyone else, so it's likely something screwed up with my hardware, though I'm not too crazy about the idea of sending it back.

 

[tds48]

Morning m8 - And welcome to the club!

I raised a thread in this sub-forum re wifi and issues I was having (nothing like yours though..). Basically mine was a case of it staying connected for around 10mins then disconnecting. One other member found distance to the router to be important, and found that was my issue as well.

So I got a mifi and have not looked back since - absolutely fantastic! When Im near a normal adsk/cable router (and signal looks good) I will use it, otherwise i power up my trusty mifi!

I specfically did not go down the dongle route a] because of drivers and b] a mifi services all my other devices

 

[torpor]

There is a situation with the current firmware where the WLAN powers itself down after some period of time .. to keep it up all day, use "sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off" to turn off the power-saving features. No doubt this will be addressed in upcoming fixes ..

 

[tsh]

There is a situation with the current firmware where the WLAN powers itself down after some period of time .. to keep it up all day, use "sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off" to turn off the power-saving features. No doubt this will be addressed in upcoming fixes ..

This is not a global fix. It works for some people. There is probably a different problem which needs to be fixed.

I don't remember seeing any discussion of USB wifi. I know my dongle does not work, but it used not to work under ubuntu (and can't remember what make it is).

The usb compat. list does not even list any dongles! There was that low profile one ED tried, which looked pretty good.

 

[paulguy]

I forgot to mention that I've had power management off. That's the only way to get anything out of it for moore than a few seconds.

 

[torpor]

Try other wifi channels?

 

[levi1123]

I've actually had to give up on Wifi on my Pandora. Run down:

Two Routers. Linksys and a Netgear, both Dual band N/G
Linksys Location ~ 20 ft across my room from me.
Channels attempted 1 - 11 Would connect on 3 once. Thats it
When it connected, it lasted a full 3 minutes of surfing with Chrome then refused to connect again
Security attempted WEP WPA2 (TKIP/AES) None. Nothing changed. Refused to connect, or kept reasking for my security code when encrypted

Netgear Location, downstairs across the length of my house from me. ( I dont know how far exactly )
Channels Attempted 1 - 11 1 11 7 9 worked but just like the Linksys worked for a few minutes then wouldn't connect again
Security attempted Same rehash of above

Now - I cant connect to wifi period in my home. I have rebooted both routers, restored my Linksys to factory settings to see if that would help somehow. No dice.

I havent tried to reflash my pandora to see if that would help. I'm wary of doing that though, as i dont want to lose my setup on the machine.

Am going to try Bluetooth Pan soon and let you know if anything works there

 

[sebt3]

Even if understand all of you very well, I never had a single problem with wifi :
Once I received my pandora I setup my WPA connection. I use mostly my pandora on the run. But I'm also using it to work on my package.
When doing so My P' stay closed, wifi up, and I always have a reliable connection for hours (ok my pandora lost connections over night, but I guess having having my router to reboot at 5 o'clock every day don't help much here )
I have more than acceptable speed.
I have an old d-link router that can do A-B-G and was the first model to support WPA...

So the Wifi does work well for some at least.

Having a feature working for some but not for others is realy hard to track down...

 

[Sphinxter]

Can you verify what protocol you're acutally using, maybe it only works properly with B. I ask as the people above with the problems seem to only have G and N if I read that right.

 

[levi1123]

Ive never forced either router to be B.. only used them as G routers so far will try that with one and get back to y'all

 

[tsh]

G only works here (was also working on B&G)

 

[paulguy]

Yeah I've tried most of your other recommendations like channels and different rooms and stuff and nothing. I could try setting B-only or G-only and see what happens, but I'm not very hopeful, since it's not really a "doesn't work at all" kind of issue as much as a "kinda works, but it's unreliable" kind of problem.

So I've pretty much given up unless someone can keep providing more things to try, otherwise I'd REALLY appreciate some USB dongle recommendations.

 

[torpor]

I just want to report that I, also, do not have problems with WLAN - it works just fine in my environment, and my Pandora (after iwconfig wlan0 power off) stays on all night without glitches. I've been using it as my primary development environment, in fact ..

 

[mosschops]

Yeah I've tried most of your other recommendations like channels and different rooms and stuff and nothing. I could try setting B-only or G-only and see what happens, but I'm not very hopeful, since it's not really a "doesn't work at all" kind of issue as much as a "kinda works, but it's unreliable" kind of problem.

So I've pretty much given up unless someone can keep providing more things to try, otherwise I'd REALLY appreciate some USB dongle recommendations.

I'm having issues with my wifi as i posted in the other thread.
I've since bought a usb - wired ethernet dongle thing that also has 4 USB ports on it. It can either draw power from the Pandora or it comes with a power supply. I've had it hooked up and pulling files down to the Pandora at 2MB/sec, it is however wired. So i'm going to try a couple of nano adaptors and see what the score is on those. probably these..

edited link - worlds smallest usb wifi

the cheapest mini usb on amazon

 

[dgame]

The Pandora Wifi drops a lot on my campus network.

I have been experimenting with iwconfig and this may help.

The ubiquitous "sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off" handles the idle drops.

For the high-speed drops I use "sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 11M auto" this limits the Wifi speed to 11 Mb/s or less.

I chose 11M because most of the time "iwconfig wlan0" reported the Bit Rate at 9 Mb/s though sometimes it would peak at 54 Mb/s.

Try to lower your bit rate along with turning off the power management and see if that stops the Wifi from dropping.

 

[WizardStan]

I chose 11M because most of the time "iwconfig wlan0" reported the Bit Rate at 9 Mb/s though sometimes it would peak at 54 Mb/s.

Now that's funny. 802.11g doesn't (officially?) support 11Mb/s. 9Mb/s yes, but if you set and get 11Mb/s, it's probably connected with 802.11b. Or doing something out of spec. My guess is it actually is connecting at 802.11b, which would be further evidence that there is something wrong with the g code in the driver that isn't a problem with the b code.
Try 12Mb/s, or 9Mb/s. Those are both g speeds. If it maintains a stable connection at those lower speeds, then it's probably a speed thing. If, even at 9Mb/s (or even try 6Mb/s, also a g speed), it still disconnects, then I would bet my next meal on it being a problem with the g protocol part of the driver.

 

[mosschops]

I'm having issues with my wifi as i posted in the other thread.
I've since bought a usb - wired ethernet dongle thing that also has 4 USB ports on it. It can either draw power from the Pandora or it comes with a power supply. I've had it hooked up and pulling files down to the Pandora at 2MB/sec, it is however wired. So i'm going to try a couple of nano adaptors and see what the score is on those. probably these..

edited link - worlds smallest usb wifi

the cheapest mini usb on amazon

The Edimax (EW-7811Un)device DOES NOT WORK (as of 30/07/2010). Tried directly & through a hub. it works fine in windows, the site lists no linux source. (this is sad as its a lovely tiny little device)

 

[paulguy]

Well, it doesn't matter now because for me to compile drivers and stuff (compat-wireless, for example), I'd need to download stuff (rootfs image, kernel source, etc.), but my DSL decided to download at 5KB/s. In turn, it's actually stable, now. :/ So when the issue comes up and I can do anything about it, I'll try those things, as well as do some research on USB sticks that work with compat-wireless.

Unfortunately, this is the second time this month it broke after they supposedly fixed it, so I just have to wait until I can switch to cable internet, which will be a couple weeks at least.

 

[paulguy]

Well, wifi has died completely. I tried to get on last night and took a lot of tiggling and rebooting and finally got connected. It dropped and now I can't get anything out of it at all. Wpa_supplicant reports successful scans, but timeouts when trying to connect, so it seems that it's just totally hosed. I have a Wii ethernet adapter which I have heard works out of the box that I could use once my internet is working right to get stuff on to it (drivers), so I imagine any Linux compatible USB stick will work, but I'm still curious about any recommendations, because these things can easily be just as bad as the pandora's wifi.

 

[mali]

^ Deleting the profile in Network Manager might help.