Intel 4965: Poor wireless performance under Ubuntu
Andrew Bolster
Senior R&D Manager (Data Science) at Black Duck Software and Treasurer @ Bsides Belfast and NI OpenGovernment Network
I had an incident recently where the Windows 7 side of my laptop connected easily to an open AP, but the Ubuntu 10.04 (or 9.04, tried both) wouldn’t, with the Intel Iwlagn drivers reporting in syslog a deauth (reason=6), basically the card spoke too soon. I eventually found the solution.
After several weeks of asking the same question everywhere I could think of (as well as emailing Intel…) I found the answer a lot closer to home, from a PhD student ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Graduate in my University over LinkedIn (Ironically enough, I’m actually working with him on my Final Year Project next year… Good stuff to come :D )
The Answer is to use the compat-wireless drivers instead of the stock drivers. In Ubuntu, this is really easy (as long as you don’t want to roll-your-own, which doesn’t take much longer).
# For Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid users:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
# For Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty users:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
# For Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic users:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic
# For Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid users (one of the following depending on the installed kernel. Most user should choose generic):
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic-pae
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-preempt
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-server
After that, just restart (easier than messing around with modprobe etc), and the job is done!