low quality network connection slows down booting

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hoppel
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low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Hi,


I have a problem which seems to be related to the quite unstable wifi network I'm using. This network does need a lot of time when connecting, sometimes it is not usable at all. When booting Linux Mint, this makes the usage - especially directly after the boot process - very slow. What mostly happens, is that Linux seems to take a break during loading X and waits for the network to connect. Usually X has mostly finished loading, but the tray icons for the network manager, Pidgin and MintUpdate doesn't appear for at least half a minute. Also the menu does not respond instantly. Then, when booting is finished, mostly the network is still not working, and to get it to work I have to reconnect a few times using a program called Wifi-radar (could use the network manager, too). Finally, sometimes the network connection is failing while already working, in this case the system and especially all applications using the network slow down - for instance Firefox (well, not all: Opera seems to be not effected).

So my questions are: is there a way to make my system more responsible and less dependent from the network connection? And is it possible to get a network connection without reconnecting manually?
I'm wondering, whether I should try to use the Windows drivers for my wlan card, because I don't have those problems under Windows. But I have card with a ralink rt2500 which should be supported good enough by Linux...?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Husse

Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by Husse »

There are drivers (for ndiswrapper) in mintWifi for rt2500
Take a look and follow the wiki to install them
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/MintWifi
If that fails we have to dig deeper
hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Hi,

I followed the instructions and network is working, but how do I know, that now ndiswrapper works instead of the original Linux driver? Otherwise it could be a placebo effect, that browsing seems to be faster now :-D
Husse

Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by Husse »

A valid question
But if you followed the wiki it should be the windows driver that do the job to the best of my knowledge (and I wrote the wifi wiki like about half of what's in there :))
hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Ok. So far my system seems to respond better now. Though I still find it curious, that the windows driver works better, while ralink offers direct Linux support.
By the way, maybe this should be installed that way by default, or there could be a dialog during the installation process, asking for whether using the Linux or the Windows driver. Maybe the difference isn't that big with good connection quality, but I will for sure stick with the Windows driver in the future.

And now I have rebooted - and unfortunately it still appears, that the networking doesn't work from the beginning. I had to deactivate and activate again the connection to get it to work.
Husse

Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by Husse »

the networking doesn't work from the beginning. I had to deactivate and activate again the connection to get it to work.
Yes this is unfortunate, but this is something that happens in all (?) operating systems. My laptop (a Compaq that's falling apart) had that in Win XP as in Cassandra
hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Really? Under Windows XP it works for me. Well, if the network is there (what's not the fact all the time). But now that I use the same driver on both OS's, it seems clearly not related to the driver, but to the OS itself. It surely was no problem earlier, when I had a wlan with a much better connection than today.
Anyway, there's also the problem of applications nearly freezing while Linux is searching for the connection - this is also annoying, and this also doesn't happen under Windows. But I guess, this has nothing to do with Mint, but with the kernel or the network manager. I suspect, most developers have a more functional network than I do :-(
Husse

Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by Husse »

You could try wicd or wifi radar
wifi radar is in synaptic wicd not, here's a link to its home page
http://wicd.sourceforge.net/
hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Thanks, I didn't know wicd until now. I already use wifi radar, but what me annoys me about it, is that I have to use it as root and also, that after I have saved a configuration for a connection, this network is shown all the time - so I cannot see whether this network is working at all. So sometimes I try several times a reconnect without success, and then I boot Windows (or delete the configuration), just to see that the network is clearly not working, so I didn't have to try at all.
hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

Ok, I installed wicd - nice program so far - but one weird thing happened: when installing it, synaptic also removed wifi-radar and the network manager... Why?
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merlwiz79
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by merlwiz79 »

hoppel wrote:Ok, I installed wicd - nice program so far - but one weird thing happened: when installing it, synaptic also removed wifi-radar and the network manager... Why?
They conflict with Wicd.
They both would be trying to control the network settings at the same time.
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hoppel
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Re: low quality network connection slows down booting

Post by hoppel »

I see. I got some error messages concerning the missing network manager which troubled me, but that was before rebooting. Now it works mostly fine, now I would even recommend to take Wicd into Mint as standard because it has far more features as the network manager. Though it has a bug - its notification area is invisible. And the workaround from the developers homepage doesn't work for me. But that's a minor problem...
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