[Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

Raqua · 2009-06-15 19:27:44

First of all, sorry for provocative subject, I wanted to drag the attention.

I have one machine, that has Arch, Ubuntu and Fedora installed. Arch is my main distro of course.
I have Zyxel G-202 USB Wifi stick, that uses zd1211rw driver included in kernel.

In Arch, when I try to copy files to my other PC (wired connection) I get max. upload 100 Kb/s. In Ubuntu I get 1.5-2 MB/s.
When just browsing, everything is fine on Arch as well, but when I start torrents or anything what really uses a lot of bandwith, my pings to router go up to 3000 ms, sometimes even 40 000 ms and then I get disconnected! This does not happen on Ubuntu. Torrents work fine there.

Now Ubuntu has 2.6.28 kernel, my fully updated Arch is on 2.6.29. If anyone knows, where I can download 2.6.28 package for Arch, I would give it a try, but I did not found it myself and I removed it from pacman cache.
I checked dmesg on both systems, everything looks fine and zd1211rw section is the same :

Ubuntu:
[ 25.184444] usb 1-3: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub
[ 25.287503] usb 1-3: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr
[ 25.362855] zd1211rw 1-3:1.0: firmware version 4725
[ 25.404846] zd1211rw 1-3:1.0: zd1211b chip 0586:3410 v4810 high 00-19-cb AL2230_RF pa0 g--NS

Arch:
usb 1-3: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub
usb 1-3: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr
zd1211rw 1-3:1.0: firmware version 4725
zd1211rw 1-3:1.0: zd1211b chip 0586:3410 v4810 high 00-19-cb AL2230_RF pa0 g--NS

Does anyone have a clue? Can you direct me someway, I am running out of ideas here ...
Thank you.

Last edited by Raqua (2009-06-16 18:22:38)

arch0r · 2009-06-15 19:29:45

pacman -Ss zd1211rw
core/zd1211-firmware 1.4-2
Firmware for the in-kernel26 zd1211rw wireless driver

Raqua · 2009-06-15 19:32:13

Thanks for your reply .. but the firmware is installed, otherwise it would not work at all.. It works, just it sucks at working ...
I tried to search, whether there is similar package for firmware in Ubuntu, but did not find any.

.:B:. · 2009-06-15 21:17:08

Try the Ubuntu kernel on your Arch system and see how the performance is. You could reasonably expect similar performance, but it's hard to do a reliable comparison if software versions differ (ie different kernel, different kernel patches (if any), different userland, etc).

You need to narrow things down to get an idea of where the problem lies, swapping kernel is the first thing to try.

Raqua · 2009-06-15 21:20:22

Well, that was what I wanted to try with old arch kernel.
Never thought of doing it the other way. But what exactly do you mean under that ? Copying the compiled kernel (I have feeling this wont work) or kompiling Ubuntu kernel under Arch ?

I wah thinking that maybe just moving the correct driver from Ubuntu might be worth a try, but it seems to be the same according to dmesg ..

gazj · 2009-06-15 21:30:44

find old arch packages here. Its a valuable bookmark

http://schlunix.org/archlinux/

Bogart · 2009-06-15 21:32:44

In this repo you can find old kernels:

http://www.schlunix.org/archlinux/core/os/

You could also try the newer 2.6.30 from testing.

#EDIT: gazj just beat me to it.

Last edited by Bogart (2009-06-15 21:34:07)

.:B:. · 2009-06-15 23:19:56

Raqua wrote:

Well, that was what I wanted to try with old arch kernel.
Never thought of doing it the other way. But what exactly do you mean under that ? Copying the compiled kernel (I have feeling this wont work) or kompiling Ubuntu kernel under Arch ?

Why wouldn't it work? You don't know until you tried it. After all that is the philosophy behind using a separate /boot often - to share kernels (although you would need the module tree too if everything you need isn't in the kernel itself).

All you need is the kernel image itself, the module tree, and maybe regenerate an initcpio image to be sure everything works (I am not sure how compatibility is between different ram disk format but I think Ubuntu doesn't use the same type of ram disk as Arch does).

Raqua · 2009-06-16 07:23:03

Ok, so first of all, thanks for the link to schlunix, I did not know that one and it comes quite handy sometimes. I keep my own pacman cache backups, so I do not need it that much, but this time it was a real saver..
I tried both, kernel 2.6.28 and 2.6.30. It works fine with 28, does not work with 30.
Now, where do I fill the bug report for this?

My only problem now is, that I skipped kernel 28 before and wen directly from 27 to 29, because nvidia drivers for 28 (180.22) did not worked for me. They were really slow, I guess there were some threads about this. I do not want to go back to kernel 27, since that one will not support ex4 filesystem of the Ubuntu installation. Ubuntu has kernel 28, and uses nvidia drivers 180.44, but on Arch, that nvidia driver has dependency on kernel>=2.6.29

.:B:. · 2009-06-16 09:35:32

Rebuild the nvidia driver then? Problem solved.

Raqua · 2009-06-16 09:42:08

I thought that nvidia driver is closed source and distributed only as a binary ...

.:B:. · 2009-06-16 09:54:20

It is, but the kernel interface for that binary blob is built against your kernel. How else do you think it can work with this myriad of different kernels on Linux?

Raqua · 2009-06-16 09:58:50

Hm .. ok, I will have to look at that, I have no idea where to start here. Seems like a geek/googler night
Thanks.

.:B:. · 2009-06-16 11:09:33

Just use the existing PKGBUILD and adapt it:

http://repos.archlinux.org/viewvc.cgi/n … xtra-i686/

I hope you're familiar with how Arch builds his packages (looking at your registration date you should be ), if not, read up on ABS in the wiki and play a bit with the PKGBUILD in that link.

Good luck.

Raqua · 2009-06-16 11:28:34

Thanks, I know how to use ABS.

zenlord · 2009-06-16 18:14:22

Might I suggest something far simpler first?

How are you connecting to your wireless network? Do you use wicd, netcfg, iwconfig or something else? For many people this makes a difference, although it shouldn't.. So go on and try to cnnect using netcfg first (it's Arch linux specific and does a very good job if you would ask me). You could also try to use ndiswrapper if your hardware uses it. It may not be the best solution, but I know I had to use it for some months until ath9k was working correct for my chipset).

Raqua · 2009-06-16 18:22:12

Thank you for your suggestion, but I just fixed it and it works fine.

I was connecting using NetworkManager, but while trying to find out what is the problem, I switched to Wicd. Did not make any difference though.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-06-15 19:27:44

[Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#2 2009-06-15 19:29:45

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#3 2009-06-15 19:32:13

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#4 2009-06-15 21:17:08

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#5 2009-06-15 21:20:22

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#6 2009-06-15 21:30:44

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#7 2009-06-15 21:32:44

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#8 2009-06-15 23:19:56

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#9 2009-06-16 07:23:03

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#10 2009-06-16 09:35:32

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#11 2009-06-16 09:42:08

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#12 2009-06-16 09:54:20

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#13 2009-06-16 09:58:50

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#14 2009-06-16 11:09:33

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#15 2009-06-16 11:28:34

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#16 2009-06-16 18:14:22

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

#17 2009-06-16 18:22:12

Re: [Sort of solved] Wireless working in Ubuntu, sucks in Arch ..

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