Getting WiFi Working on the Averatec AV4155-EH1 and More
Well, it took a little while to get the WiFi working and I still don't feel like DHCP is working for it. At the two places we've been commonly using the laptop, we've set up scripts to start the WiFi. Which is the other annoying part: The WiFi isn't being controlled by the system-config-network from the GUI.
It seems most of the Averatec laptops have Ralink RT2500 WiFi chipsets in them. Ralink actually provides source for compiling on Linux. However, this source won't compile under Fedora Core 5 (FC5) yet. So, in comes the open source driver from the guys at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com. Well, their older, but stable, driver also doesn't compile under FC5. They have a newer code base under source control that does compile, but just a couple of months ago they switched to a new core code base and so it's still very expiremental. In fact, you have to edit a file before it'll compile under FC5.
However, once I had all of that done, some commands figured out, and compiled a couple of tools that they provide, I had working WiFi. Unfortunately, my experience has mirrored a couple of others' experience. This driver has a packet loss in the 10-20% range, on average. Over a long enough ping session, I've seen as low as 8%. That's still pretty high, though. Many applications don't work very well at that level of loss. Even with Firefox it's often easier to hit stop and click a link again if it seems to be taking a while.
Performance wise, though, I'm getting around the rates I would expect at home. That is, I transferred the Ubuntu AMD64 live CD at about 580 KBps. (On a side note, burning that ISO worked perfectly from FC5 on the Averatec.)
Now why would I get the Ubuntu Live CD, you might be wondering? Well, as it turns out, it supports the Ralink RT2500 directly. I figure that I can either use it to see how to get the driver working with the system a bit more naturally or I can switch to Ubuntu instead of FC5.
It doesn't really matter too much which distribution I use. The Ubuntu 5.1 CD was running on a bit older version of the 2.6 kernel. I think it was 2.6.8 or something like that. This installation of FC5 is running on 2.6.16. They both run Gnome, so many of the tools are exactly the same, but just themed differently.
However, the Live CD didn't have any laptop or power management support, from what I could tell. This meant I couldn't determine if it would really work all that better. Right now, I can't suspend the system. I rely on suspend to turn on and off a laptop much faster than is possible with shutting it down and turning it back on. This is very important with battery life, too, because the boot cycle is pretty intensive on the system and tends to eat batteries faster than at times when it's just idling while you're typing.
Between the lack of suspend working and the lack of WiFi working with DHCP or even in some sort of automated fashion, this doesn't yet make a good "Starbucks" machine, if that makes sense. That is, I can't just take it out, select a particular access point, and be up and running. Without DHCP working, I can really only get on to known networks where I know safe static IP addresses that I can assign while configuring the card.
The power management does seem to slow the CPU down. Right now, it's running at 800MHz, according to /proc/cpuinfo. I just have it set to blank the screen when I close the lide because of the suspend issue. I manually have to reduce the screen brightness to help save power. That, alone, makes a big difference in the power. Sometimes the little power management icon won't even try to guess how much time is left.
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Linux on the Averatec AV3250HX
3250 Ubuntu Live - Unofficial Averatec Support Forums
Author: Shane
Category: Tech
Date Published: 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM
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