wireless, packet loss

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

Hello.

I recently got a Lucent Orinoco Gold wireless card for my laptop. At
home, it connects through a LinkSys 900 WAP. I'm using the orinoco_cs
driver (plus associated kernel modules). The kernel is a hand-compiled
version of 2.4.18:

Linux lapdog 2.4.18 #2 Tue Jan 28 23:44:35 PST 2003 i686 Intel(R)
Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux 

The system is Debian testing, up to date.

lsmod reveals:

radeon                 86368   1
orinoco_cs              4264   1
orinoco                29224   0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes                  3332   0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
hid                    12488   0 (unused)
ds                      6408   1 [orinoco_cs]
yenta_socket            8352   1
pcmcia_core            38624   0 [orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket]
usb-uhci               20940   0 (unused)
usbcore                48096   1 [hid usb-uhci]
agpgart                15464   3
i810_audio             19912   0
soundcore               3460   2 [i810_audio]
ac97_codec              9288   0 [i810_audio]
sg                     27868   0 (unused)
ide-scsi                7312   0
scsi_mod               56908   2 [sg ide-scsi]
8139too                13000   0 (unused)

Subjectively, I'm pleased with the performance---download speeds and
connectivity speeds in general don't seem that different from what I
get from the gateway/firewall machine directly.

However, in the logs there are loads and loads of messages like this:

Mar 20 21:06:16 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01ED)
Mar 20 21:06:17 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01D9)
Mar 20 21:06:33 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01B1)
Mar 20 21:06:34 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=019D)
Mar 20 21:06:36 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=0175)
Mar 20 21:06:42 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=0161)
Mar 20 21:07:06 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01C5)
Mar 20 21:07:07 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01B1)
Mar 20 21:08:50 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01ED)
Mar 20 21:08:51 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01C5)
Mar 20 21:08:52 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=01B1)
Mar 20 21:08:58 lapdog kernel: eth1: Tx error, status 1 (FID=0189)

They come every couple of minutes.

Is this just routine and to be lived with? Or are there things I could
tweak to eliminate this apparent problem?

Thanks,

Jim