ubuntu 7.04 wireless signal strength

[the mitzman]

So I just installed Ubuntu 7.04, everything driver-wise was automatically installed and configured. One problem I'm having though is with my wireless network card. It's an Atheros chipset card so it's using "restricted drivers". Now in Windows XP, I'm always at "Excellent" signal strength and no drop-outs. In linux, I'm getting random drop-outs and only 45% signal strength. I'm not sure why. Has anyone seen anything like this and is there any specific information I should provide?

EDIT: Also, it seems that I will just get disconnected from my router, and I'll have to disable wireless and then disable networking and then re-enable. For the record I'm using Gnome.

[je_fro]

Watch your logs to see what's happening.... ie:
tail -f /var/log/messages

and wait to see if there are any messages concerning your ath0 interface.

[the mitzman]

Watch your logs to see what's happening.... ie:
tail -f /var/log/messages

and wait to see if there are any messages concerning your ath0 interface.

I'll give this a go tonight. Also I'm wondering if it's a problem with Gnome and network manager. I haven't tried this out with KDE (I need to install that). I'll post the results after I get some time this evening to try it out.

[the mitzman]

Ok so I looked on the Ubuntu forums and found the following two posts:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=540101&highlight=atheros
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=516801&highlight=atheros

I had a hunch it had to do with network manager and madwifi in conjunction with the Atheros restricted drivers. I'm going to try out what the posts suggest tonight and I'll post back the results.

[the mitzman]

So here's what I did. I reloaded Ubuntu (feisty) from scratch (since I only had installed it the night before and didn't do anything worthy it wasn't a big deal). After the installation and reboot, I logged in and immediately uninstalled network-manager (don't forget to remove the option to have network-manager start at session startup). After that's done, go ahead and use dpkg to install wicd (make sure you download the .deb file from http://wicd.sourceforge.net before removing network-manager).

At this point, run wicd and then choose your wireless ap and enter the wep or wpa or whatever other security you use. Everything worked great on the first try and I'm no longer having random disconnects. However, I'm still getting a bad signal strength but that's just due to driver bugs. The throughput speed seems to be pretty good otherwise.