Mandriva

OneIdJack · 09-20-2006, 08:25 AM

Hey team, I have installed Mandriva One on my Compaq Presario R3000. I have successfully installed the built in Broadcom 4306 wireless driver. It is working...but... it is pulling in very low bandwith. Has anyone experienced this? The blue light for wireless is on, and I can get on the web, but the signal strength is very low.

If I reboot into XP, by signal strength is excellent.

Any ideas?
Im a noob at Linux so be gentle... 8-)

Thanks for your time.

Compaq Presario R3000
512mb RAM
3.0ghz processor
Dual boot with windows XP Home
Mandriva One
Broadcom wireless 4306 built in.

J.W. · 09-20-2006, 01:04 PM

Welcome to LQ. It sounds like your machine is detecting multiple wireless signals, but is not using the strongest one. Open a console session then

Code:

ifconfig

which will show the status of your network interfaces (eth0, eth1, and so forth). Let's assume that eth1 is your wireless interface, so then

Code:

iwlist eth1 scan

which will display all the different signals your system can find, along with other interesting information such as signal strength, whether or not encryption is being used, etc. Your own signal should appear in the list. For illustration, let's assume it's called "mysignal", so to associate it with your interface you could

Code:

ifdown eth1
iwconfig eth1 essid mysignal
ifup eth1

Those 3 steps will bring down the eth1 interface, tell it to use mysignal, then bring it back up again. Please see the man pages for ifconfig and iwconfig. Good luck with it

OneIdJack · 09-20-2006, 07:55 PM

Thanks for the reply J.W. I will check that out. I do see 3 available networks, and I have WEP on mine and have specifically logged onto my network. I can get to the web and such, but signal strength still shows the smallest tick on the scale.

I will post what my results are when I try what you mentioned.

Thanks again!

OneIdJack

J.W. · 09-20-2006, 09:28 PM

If you are using encryption you will need to include the "key" parameter as well. Check the iwconfig man pages for more info, but it's basically just adding "key ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" to the iwconfig command. Substitute the actual key in place of my dummy value

The situation you describe is pretty common - the machine will try to use the strongest signal available, but unless you give it the encryption key value it needs, any encrypted signals will *not* be available.