On 04/04/2013 12:01 PM, Chris Knadle wrote:
On Wednesday, April 03, 2013 18:09:02, Gary A Mort wrote:
On 4/3/2013 2:19 AM, Chris Knadle wrote:
The typical thing I'd do from here would be to get the kernel source
(the vanilla linux-stable Git repo, git checkout v3.8.5), start with
the default config file from Mint's kernel by copying over
/boot/config-$(uname -r) to ".config" in the kernel source directory,
run 'make oldconfig' to make choices about new options, then 'make
menuconfig' and make sure to include this wireless driver. Then build
the kernel directly to a .deb package (two ways to do that -- the
Linux upstream kernel has a tool for this, or you can use make-kpkg
from the Debian kernel-package package), then install it and try it.
If you want to try this, let me know -- I can help guide you through
it. Also requires the 'firmware-realtek' package, the description of
which (for the package in Debian Sid/Unstable) lists firmware for
both of these devices. Building a custom kernel is something I've
very typically had to do for new hardware. :-/ The mainstream
distribution kernels tend to lag upstream by about a year.
I generally eventually build a custom kernel just to get to the latest
kernel....but I just did not have time to fiddle with wireless settings
anymore.
The good news though is that today, after being thoroughly disgusted
with Win8's performance, I did some unpacking[I moved just this month] -
and ran across my box of broken laptops. 15 minutes of poking through
and harvesting, and I grabbed a few min-PCI wifi cards and checked to
see if one worked in place of the current one AND was not a realtek.
Once I had a working wifi card, I swapped hard drives and reinstalled
mint and now things are running smoothly.
Most troubleshooting steps include enabling software encryption - which
had worked for me before. On the new laptop it made things worse and I
found I had to disable it instead to get slightly better performance.
My guess is that there is a binary blob being used when on-card
encryption is used - and that the problem lies with it.
There's a binary firmware blob for both devices, required to get them to work
at all. Yay wireless. Almost all wireless devices have this issue.
Enabling software encoding moves things off the card and onto the CPU,
bypassing the problem. Since my new system is rather low end, I assume
the CPU just can't keep up with wifi.
*shrug*....it works for windows and runs PHPStorm and Smartgit, so I can
use it for projects and get a better system a few months down the line.
The fact that it works on Windows seems to contradict this. There's virtually
no hardware that I don't think could keep up with wireless... wireless is
slow.
By "works on Windows" I meant that the card was working with all it's
default settings on Windows, it was only when swapping to Linux that I
had to change settings around.
But now I've got a working wifi in Mint, so goodbye sluggish windows,
hello Minty my old friend.
-Gary
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