[Novalug] desktop PCI wireless D-Link card DW-522 installation on Ubuntu 11.10

Jay Hart jhart@kevla.org
Tue Dec 27 19:13:30 EST 2011


Nino,

Congrats on getting this to work.

And a special Thank You to Jon.  He is a great guy, helped me out last year
big time.

Jay

> All,
>
> this is to let everyone who wondered what happened with this problem
> know that it's solved: I'm now on my desktop computer connected to the
> web through this wireless card, and FiOS.
>
> Great thanks go to Jon LaBadie, who went far beyond the very tenuous
> duty many of you feel when a mailinglister calls for help. Besides the
> various responses you may have seen on the list, he even came to my
> house where we spent hours dealing with the problem.
>
> And, a weird one it turned out to be. Much of the problem seemed to have
> solved itself in a ridiculously easy way: we turned the machine around,
> so that the card's antennas were no longer shielded by the computer's
> beautiful, almost solid aluminum, case. Apparently, in the suspected
> 'shielded orientation', the signal was barely strong enough to connect.
> It sometimes it worked a little but reluctantly, and sometimes it didn't
> connect
> at all.
>
> We learned a lot, but there are lots of things remaining I don't know.
> For example, how do you interpret the quantities you get by
> doing 'iwconfig': is 'Tx-power (transmission power) 27 dBm good or bad?
> Does 'Link Quality = 27/70 mean that it's only 27 out of 70, so not so
> good? And Signal Level: -82 dBm seems pretty poor, but what is
> 'normal'? 'desirable'? There's nothing in 'man' that I see that tells you.
>
> Jon did notice, and solve, a long-standing problem that confused us
> for a long time. I have yet to see this one anywhere. It is this.
>
> Some time ago I had asked a knowledgeable colleague to install Ubuntu
> on this machine so that he'd feel good about keeping my Ubuntu laptop
> that I had loaned him. Since he didn't know exactly what I liked, he
> kept it flexible and added a user called simply 'user', This user seems
> to have been installed as 'root', because every time something  had to
> be changed in the system that demanded root privileges a screen
> popped up that asked for the 'user password'. Until now I had always
> thought that this meant 'my password'. Of course, this never worked,
> and there were lots of things I could not change through the various
> GUIs that demanded this password. Fortunately, I could change many
> of these through the command line, so it wasn't something critical.
> However, the necessary parameters for the wireless card could not
> be stored until Jon deleted this 'user'. Then, the GUIs asked for
> 'root password', which of course I knew. Weird problem solved.
>
> Thanks to everyone who participated in dealing with this problem,
> of course especially Jon.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Nino
> _______________________________________________
> Novalug mailing list
> Novalug@calypso.tux.org
> http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/novalug
>





More information about the Novalug mailing list