Arch Linux

jcci

Member

From: China / Germany

Registered: 2007-06-10

Posts: 185

Macbook 3 Pro Problems

Wireless:
I'm using Arch64 on MBP3. The madwifi driver generally seems to work very well. My actual setup includes networkmanager and the knetworkmanager frontend. After fresh boot of the computer wireless almost always connects. It may then work for hours or just for minutes, but it always fails after some time. I didn't find any way to reconnect again. My last attempt was a script to stop networkmanager and dbus, unload all wireless drivers and then modprobe again and start dbus and networkmanager. The device just does not exist anymore.
Any similar experiences or ideas how to solve?

Pommed:
Recentely pommed is crashing frequently. As soon as I touch the volume buttoms it works once and then crashes. Actually it was OK before for long time already. The error.log shows some problems with pommed related to dbus.

Bluetooth:
Any reliable howto I didn't see? So far it does not work at all.

IR:
Anybody has a working lirc setup?

Thanks in advance! I hope by the time to provide more solutions instead of just requesting.

abstracity

Member

From: Houston, USA

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 83

Re: Macbook 3 Pro Problems

RE:Wireless:

Disconnects happen over here too, but I'm almost always able to reconnect.  I have read that the signal strength will not be as great as in OS X, due to the closed nature of the hardware; if madwifi.org had all the information Apple has, they would, theoretically, be able to create a driver with matching efficiency.  The madwifi driver for your MBP3 may also not be stable, and if yours has the AR5008 chipset, the information about full support to be included in the 0.9.4 release is promising, indeed.

See if doing things from the console, without dbus and all the abstraction layers, helps at all.  Here are two of several bash aliases I use to connect to hotspots that I frequent:

alias home='/sbin/modprobe ath_pci; /etc/rc.d/network start; /bin/sleep 1; /usr/bin/netcfg eHomeWifi'

alias tmobile='/sbin/modprobe ath_pci; /etc/rc.d/network start; /bin/sleep 1; /usr/bin/netcfg tmobile'

If my network is dropped, which doesn't happen very often, I type "rnet", an alias I defined as:

alias rnet='/usr/bin/netcfg --stopall; /etc/rc.d/network stop; /sbin/modprobe -r ath_pci wlan_tkip wlan_s
can_sta ath_rate_minstrel'

I then reconnect with the appropriate alias and typically everything is fine.  Here is my /etc/network-profiles/eHomeWifi profile (Note: I am able to connect through WPA2 just fine with the "AUTOWPA" option, which simplifies things as it does not require a configured /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file):

DESCRIPTION="eHome Wireless Profile"
INTERFACE=ath0
HOSTNAME=macbook
IFOPTS="192.168.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255"
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
DNS1=192.168.0.1

ESSID=eHome
IWOPTS="mode Managed essid $ESSID"
USEWPA="yes"
WPAOPTS="-D wext"
AUTOWPA="yes"
PASSKEY="password"

And as a further note, the "madwifi-svn" package from the AUR used to be the working solution for me, but the main "madwifi" package in the core repository works fine for me now.

RE:Pommed:

I don't use sound on this laptop, but when I was testing to see if it would work, I had the same problem.

RE:Bluetooth

I don't currently use this device, so sorry! :\

RE:IR

Now, I do have a working setup for this.  When I was using kernel26-2.6.23, I installed lirc-0.8.3pre1 and lirc-utils-0.8.3pre1, as the current lirc packages in the extra repositories do not contain the required "macmini" driver (the driver sounds ill-named, even though it also works for the MacBook).  I edited the "lirc" PKGBUILD from the core repository by changing the version numbers to "0.8.3.pre1" and commenting out the "build" lines that patch the source.  I did that for both the "lirc" and "lirc-utils" packages, and then installed them.  After, if I remember correctly, I was able to get a working config through this command:

/usr/bin/irrecord --driver=macmini --device=/dev/usb/hiddev0

I am using the kernel26zen-git package in the AUR, and I have not built the lirc-*-0.8.3pre1 snapshots to see if they work for the 2.6.24.1 kernel release, but they worked perfectly for 2.6.23.*.  I was able to control xpdf and djview with the Apple Remote through irxevent, as well as mpd through irexec.

---

Without error there can be no brilliancy. ― Emanuel Lasker

Husio

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2005-12-04

Posts: 359

Website

Re: Macbook 3 Pro Problems

Could you please paste your PKGBUILDs of lirc and lirc-utils?

Last edited by Husio (2008-02-23 00:22:05)