big improvement with Experimental kernel 3.7.3
With the Wheezy kernel, I've experienced serious problems in WiFi
support because of the iwlwifi driver for Intel Centrino Ultimate
6300. For quite a while, I've been running kernels from the Debian
experimental server, various little things would break from
time-to-time. The wireless networking has been good since 3.4, but in
3.7.1 I was having some serious sound problems. After suspends, the
sound was "choppy" and full of distortion in any kind of video
(youtube, mplayer, etc). Some Googling confirmed these problems and I
found a thread (including discussion of a patch written by Linus
Torvalds) indicating that the sound problems were fixed after 3.7.1.
Awesome news. Reports were right. Everything is working "right now"
(cautious!). Two days ago I updated the kernel to 3.7.3.1, more
precisely:
$ uname -a
Linux pols-124 3.7-trunk-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.7.3-1~experimental.1
x86_64 GNU/Linux
and it is a big improvement.
I'm able to join ordinary WiFi networks (WPA2) as well as the
Enterprise wireless network, including the multi-university "Eduroam"
system.
So, in case you are having WiFi trouble with Intel devices that use
iwlwifi or have the "choppy" sound problem, I'm testifying that
3.7.3.1 from Experimental has the magic potion.
Here's one other piece of happy news about the kernel. On my laptop,
battery life is longer. I'd guess battery life is 10-20 longer. I
don't know if this is caused by differences in cpufrequency or what,
but there's some noticeable difference.
pj
--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu
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