Wireless connection slowed after upgrade to Puppy 4.1

[itsagas2]

I upgraded from Puppy 4.0 to 4.1 and seen my wireless network connection speed drop by half. When I opened a bittorent connection it could barely manage a slow signal.

So I blew away all my saved Puppy configuration files, pup_410.sfs and pup_save.2fs and tried a fresh configuration install but still had the same problem.

I went back to Puppy 4.0 and my network speed and my torrent download speeds are back.

Did something happen with 4.1 to degrade the RT2500 wireless PCMIA driver, possibly?

I have a Belkin PCMIA 54G F5D7010 and it defaults using the Ralink RT2500 driver with the Network wizard.

[itsagas2]

Upgrade to Puppy 4.1 or 4.11 choking my PCMCIA network speed with my Belkin PCMIA 54G F5D7010 - driver - Ralink RT2500 driver

I've been using Puppy Dingo 4.0 with great success. However when I upgrade to 4.1 or 4.11 my my network kilobytes per second takes a nose dive.

Puppy Dingo 4.0
1.08megabits per second
131.44kilobytes per second
15.551seconds

Puppy 4.1
165.82kilobits per second
20.24kilobytes per second
100.977seconds

I think the improved PCMCIA upgrade in 4.1 distro support now using the native uevent/udev mechanism and dropping the old pcmcia_cs package is some how related to choking my network kilobytes per second speed loss from 1.2 megabytes per sec to 200 kilobytes per sec. I'm using a Belkin PCMCIA 54G F5D710 minibus card, Puppy loads the Ralink RT2500 driver.

I can't figure out where to make file configuration adjustments that will correct this issue. I've tried to make hardware changes with options in a .config script file in the /etc/pcmcia directory, but didn't have any luck

Any Ideas?

[valpy]

A number of websites have reported that rt2500 gives slow default connection speeds of 1Mbit/sec when using kernel 2.6.24 or greater. The iwconfig output reports 54Mbit/sec but it's not actually delivered by default.

This may explain why you had good speeds in puppy 4.0 but no longer in 4.1 (assuming this is the 2.6.25 kernel, not the retro version).

Apparently, forcing the rate in iwconfig is a successful workaround.

Code: Select all

iwconfig ra0 rate 54M fixed

from an rxvt console should do it (assuming ra0 is your interface).

If not, try dropping the rate to 11M or 5.5M.

If it works, make it permanent by including the iwconfig command at the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file so it is run at startup.

[itsagas2]

Thanks valpy I'll try it.

What other Linus site are you gleaning from, I"ll use them the next time I have trouble before I post.

[valpy]

No specific sites - I did a google search on rt2500, linux and rate which threw up a few relevant things, some on Ubuntu bug sites and some more kernel-related pages.

My suspicions were aroused by rate issues I had recently on rtl8187. Looks like wifi rates are a problem area for newer kernels with several drivers ......

Anyway, I hope the rate suggestion helps.