Well, having sorted out my Ogg Vorbis playback issues on the Life Drive yesterday, I decided to address the issue of it not talking to my Wireless Access Point. Initially I thought it might be a problem with it authenticating via WPA-PSK. It then occurred to me that it might be that it doesn't talk 802.11g. Checked the specs and sure enough, it only supports .b.

So, logged into the router/WAP and changed its settings to support .g and .b. The LifeDrive went right ahead and connected once I provided the authentication key. Problem solved.

Well, not quite because with the WAP accepting .b and .g, my laptop (which frankly it's more important to be able to use Wi-Fi with) only communicates at 1Mb/s rather than the 54 I'd expect. I confirmed that this wasn't just nm-applet getting confused in reporting the speed by pinging a machine on my LAN, the response times with .b and .g enabled were about twice those with just .g enabled.

The wireless adaptor is an Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG which uses the ipw3945 module and I've confirmed that it's not the adaptor itself that uses the slower speed when both are available by booting in to the Less Free OS^TM and it connects at 54Mb/s then.

I've looked at the README and checked the mode, normally it is mode 7 (802.11abg) but even if I set it to mode 4 (802.11g only) it still only connects at 1Mb/s with both types enabled on the WAP. One interesting thing is that when I enable both types on the WAP, nm-applet reports the connection strength as being 60% or so whereas normally it is 90%+ in this room.

I've searched a lot and come up with no more help, so I ask the Planet SUSE/Planet GNOME UK communities if they are able to help. If so, please get in touch.

Oh yes, if it helps, it's roughly the same as this problem but the suggested solution - iwprive - is what I've tried to no avail.

Users of Mad Penguin who are syndicated on Planet SUSE (Fred, Narayan) should drop me an email as soon as they know what arrangements they're going to make for their blogs once MP apparently goes the way of the (mad) dodo.