N140 Karmic Realtek 8192E WiFi
Posted: 29 Nov 2009, 14:28
Hi all,
I received my N140 on Friday and so I've been busily getting Karmic NBR up and running on it this weekend. The nc10 scripts seem like a great start though I still have a number of issues with Fn keys not working etc at the moment. But anyway, first things first - the wifi...
My N140 (UK model) came with a Realtek 8192e network card which didn't work with the initial Karmic NBR install. I was able to get it working using ndiswrapper very quickly though (for anyone looking for how to do that it was simply a case of downloading the windows driver zip from samsung and unpacking it in a temporary location; then using the Ubuntu Software Center to install 'Windows Wireless Drivers' package, running that and pointing it at the .inf in the windows driver zip).
I had installed the nc10-scripts package as described in this forum and the next step was to test turning the wifi on/off with Fn+F9, which didn't work. I then found that 'sudo nc10 wifi on/off' didn't work either. So then I looked into the mechanism used by the scripts and here's what I found:
If I try turning off the wlan0 txpower with 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower off' then the wifi disconnects from the access point and tries to reconnect again (spinning icon in the panel), eventually failing. Viewing the output of iwconfig however still shows 'Tx-Power:20 dBm' which means that the nc10 script assumes that the txpower is still on.
Switching the txpower back to normal with 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower auto' allows the wifi to reconnect again. Sometimes it seems to try to reconnect straight away, without any user intervention, once I issue that command and it seems like when that happens I get prompted for the WPA key again. I cancel that and then use the panel applet to select my access point again and it then seems to connect to it fine using my stored credentials etc.
So, the above method of using txpower doesn't seem to work well with ndiswrapper from what I can tell. Instead, using the modprobe method as per previous versions of the nc10 wifi script seems to work well.
I can turn off the wifi with 'sudo modprobe -r ndiswrapper' and then turn it back on with 'sudo modprobe ndiswrapper' and at that point it connects back to my access point just fine.
So I reverted '/etc/default/nc10-scripts' and '/usr/lib/nc10/wifi.sh' back to how they were as of revision 21 and now the 'sudo nc10 wifi on/off' seems to work fine (though the wifi led is still constantly lit).
The Fn+F9 key press still doesn't work for me, but I'll look into that separately.
Matt
I received my N140 on Friday and so I've been busily getting Karmic NBR up and running on it this weekend. The nc10 scripts seem like a great start though I still have a number of issues with Fn keys not working etc at the moment. But anyway, first things first - the wifi...
My N140 (UK model) came with a Realtek 8192e network card which didn't work with the initial Karmic NBR install. I was able to get it working using ndiswrapper very quickly though (for anyone looking for how to do that it was simply a case of downloading the windows driver zip from samsung and unpacking it in a temporary location; then using the Ubuntu Software Center to install 'Windows Wireless Drivers' package, running that and pointing it at the .inf in the windows driver zip).
I had installed the nc10-scripts package as described in this forum and the next step was to test turning the wifi on/off with Fn+F9, which didn't work. I then found that 'sudo nc10 wifi on/off' didn't work either. So then I looked into the mechanism used by the scripts and here's what I found:
If I try turning off the wlan0 txpower with 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower off' then the wifi disconnects from the access point and tries to reconnect again (spinning icon in the panel), eventually failing. Viewing the output of iwconfig however still shows 'Tx-Power:20 dBm' which means that the nc10 script assumes that the txpower is still on.
Switching the txpower back to normal with 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 txpower auto' allows the wifi to reconnect again. Sometimes it seems to try to reconnect straight away, without any user intervention, once I issue that command and it seems like when that happens I get prompted for the WPA key again. I cancel that and then use the panel applet to select my access point again and it then seems to connect to it fine using my stored credentials etc.
So, the above method of using txpower doesn't seem to work well with ndiswrapper from what I can tell. Instead, using the modprobe method as per previous versions of the nc10 wifi script seems to work well.
I can turn off the wifi with 'sudo modprobe -r ndiswrapper' and then turn it back on with 'sudo modprobe ndiswrapper' and at that point it connects back to my access point just fine.
So I reverted '/etc/default/nc10-scripts' and '/usr/lib/nc10/wifi.sh' back to how they were as of revision 21 and now the 'sudo nc10 wifi on/off' seems to work fine (though the wifi led is still constantly lit).
The Fn+F9 key press still doesn't work for me, but I'll look into that separately.
Matt