Slow Orinoco Wifi on Sarge
I've freshly installed Debian Sarge (now stable) on
a Dell Lattitude CPiR (P-II-400). with a Dell Truemobile
1150 802.11b PCMCIA wifi card. This is a rebadged Orinoco Card.
The base station is a Netgear MR814V2 with updated firmware.
I apt-get'ed up to the 2.6 kernel.
I get really slow performance with the wifi network.
Downloading off the web is ~ 150 kbits/sec, and network
behaviour is so slow that running remote X applications
from other machines on my home network is really painful,
with glacial updates.
iwconfig indicates normal behaviour. Curiously, I have been
unable to change the channel on my card.
Then I can hot-swap to a wired Linksys 10/100Mb card, and
everything is normal. Speed is what would be expected, and
remote X is no problem.
I've tried turning off WEP, but observe no difference.
This is with a static network assignment.
I had some earlier problems with nameservers when I was
hotplugging, I think the resolvconf package cleared that
up. I have no problems with making connections, but
making connections quickly and download data rate
are poor.
In a previous incarnation, this wifi card worked fine on
this laptop with Mandrake Linux (9.1). I assume if I
dual boot over to windows 98 it will be fine as well.
I'd be interested in hearing of others' experiences on this
kernel with orinoco cards, or suggestions for other easily
available models that are well supported.
It looks like hotplug loads orinoco, orinoco_cs, and hermes
modules when the card is plugged in.
At somepoint I downloaded kismet, but I never set it up.
Could that be implicated somehow?
Thanks
-- Robert Neff
robert at neffs dot net
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