Xubuntu, wifi connects in one room but not another.
 

I installed Xubuntu yesterday and it seems to be running fine.
My main problem is that the wifi connects fine while in the same room as the router (the office), but won't connect in a different room (the bedroom).

I have never had problems connecting to the wifi router from my bedroom before, and I have successfully gotten two previous versions of Linux to connect from there. I do not know the cause of this, but I suspect the problem resides with the txpower setting since it connects fine when the wifi card is near the router. I have tried it at 27 and 1 (the apparent max and min values for my card) and neither setting seems to affect the success of the connection.

Computer specs:
OS: Xubuntu 8.04 x86_64.
Network: Netopia 3D reach usb wifi card (rt2500 chipset).
Drivers: Ndiswrapper (1.52) and wpa_supplicant (0.5.8) with the 32bit windows drivers from AT&T (here)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

(If You need more information just let me know)

What is the signal strength in the other room (in terms of "bars", percentages or whatever you can find it)?

Did you use the same wifi adapter previously?

Have you tried to move the router around in the room? In my experience massive stone walls may occasionally block the signal.

Best,
Ott

To see the signal level, enter this in a terminal (as root):

iwlist wlan0 scan (assumes that your wireless device is wlan0--try also eth0, eth1, etc.)

You might get some help by just changing the antenna position, or--as already suggested--moving the router. There are also range extenders but I have no experience with same.

The signal levels are:

Bedroom:
Quality=49/100 Signal level=-64 dBm

Office:
Quality=54/100 Signal level=-35 dBm

I have tried moving the wifi card around some, but the results were no better than before moving it.

Additionally, after running the connection script, it will sometimes say it is connected (while in the bedroom), but when it does the speed is very slow. So slow as to make Firefox unable to bring pages up, but sometimes it manages to load the page title.

It sounds like the signal is simply too weak. Unfortunately I cannot tell you whether a bad/wrongly configured driver may behave like this. In fact, laptops (drivers? antennas?) are different. I have experienced that my laptop needs signal strength 50+% while some others do very well with 30%.

Note also that we mean you should move around the router, not just the card.

Best,
Ott

first, find out why the quality is so low when you are close to the router. If I put my laptop within a few feet of the router, I get 100/100. Try moving the router and also changing the angle of the antenna. If possible, try with a different computer to see which end of the interface is weak.

I re-installed OpenSuse and it had 92% connection from the bedroom. So I have no idea why Xubuntu would only think it's ~50%.

It could be that I bungled the driver install or something, but then, the 64 bit Linux versions always did give me trouble with the network. I guess I'll try the 32 bit version and see if it works any better with my network.

Glad to hear of the progress...