Saturday, August 15, 2015

PCIe WiFi Card that Works with Ubuntu 15.04

My good old Ralink RT2561 card gives me too much trouble on 15.04.  The connection speed has never been great especially when compared to my other computers.  With 15.04, the WiFi is practically unusable.  In the event it got a connection, it can be as slow as 1Mb/s and tops out at 11Mb/s and then before I know it, it msysteriously disconnects.  I tried many cookbook method or snakeoils to fix it, alas to no avail.

So I decided it's about time to give the computer an upgrade.

I have to say since most things worked on my Linux box right up until 15.04, I haven't been following vendors that have been Ubuntu or Linux certified.

Long story short, my facebook friend gave me a link to ThinkPenguin and finally I got myself a PCIe card.  It's a housebranded card using b/g/n standard with dual antenna and allegedly can reach top rate at 300Mb/s.

I just did a iwlist rate and it gave me at 58.5Mb/s.  At times, it says 65Mb/s.  So it's a big improvement compared to the old one which is only b/g with top speed at 54Mb/s, which is simply an unobtainium speed.

The card is not 100% plug-and-play.  The wicd manager doesn't know or doesn't guess right the wlan number.  So I have to manually change that.  The second thing is when the computer wakes up from sleep or suspend, it cannot re-establish the connection.  Even human intervention is hit or miss.  Since I removed network manager--my snakeoil approach to fix my last card, I don't know if network manager would work better with the card.

lspci returns:
02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

dmesg | grep AR92 returns:
[   17.965148] ieee80211 phy0: Atheros AR9280 Rev:2 mem=0xffffc900129e0000, irq=16

lshw returns:
           *-network
                description: Wireless interface
                product: AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)
                vendor: Qualcomm Atheros
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
                logical name: wlan3
                version: 01
                serial: 00:22:43:4c:ad:2f
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless
                configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k driverversion=3.19.0-25-generic firmware=N/A ip=192.168.1.14 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
                resources: irq:16 memory:fdaf0000-fdafffff

ThinkPenguin lists the chipset as
Atheros AR9281 and its model being TPE-N300PCIE4 ($29 PLUS USPS 6.95 = $35.95)

In any event, I can say that it works, 99% of the time, and definitely better than my last card on 15.04.  It no longer drops connection left and right or connects at ridiculously slow rate like 1Mb/s.  The only issue so far is once disconnected, like from suspend, it can't connect automatically or even manually with certain reliability.  Further investigation needed.

Maybe if you just go out and buy any Wifi card with the Atheros AR928X chipset, it would work on 15.04.  Who knows?

UPDATE
8/17/2015
Finally got the chance to remove wicd and reinstalled network manager for GNOME.  Now the wifi can reliably reconnect after suspend.  While I removed wicd, I got no wifi, I have to plug in my RJ45 cable to my MBP to share its wifi connection in order to install network manager--I can't install network manager if I have wicd installed.


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