Recently in Crashes when using Cnet USB Wifi stick Category

I'm a big proponent of the long-term-release concept in operating systems because I think both the enterprise and the home user doesn't want things breaking and should have the option of sticking with a particular distribution longer than 6 or 12 months.

And I stuck with the current long-term release of Ubuntu — 8.04 — for well over a year because it worked fairly well with the particular hardware I'm using.

But often a new release can clear up problems and be more stable than the perceived "stable" release.

That seems to be the case with my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop and Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter.

While it worked great in OpenBSD 4.4 and worked OK in various Linux distributions with newish kernels, I was having intermittent crashes in Ubuntu while using the adapter. I'd be using the laptop with the CWD-854 for a couple of hours and, without warning, the screen would freeze and nothing short of a hard restart would bring it back.

Well, I finally decided to upgrade to 9.04 (on the cusp of 9.10's release, if you hadn't noticed). I'll have a review in the near future. (Bet everyone can't wait for my 9.04 review when 9.10 is almost here, right?)

The upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 and then 9.04 took about six hours, accounting for both download and install time.

The changes to NetworkManager between 8.04 and 8.10 (the app looks and works much unlike it's predecessor) threw me for awhile, and I've finally got a fair handle on how to manage both wired and wireless networking.

One bonus I've been enjoying for the past few days is greater stability when using the Cnet CWD-854 WiFi adapter. It runs great, has a strong connection to my router, and I haven't had a crash of any kind since I made the upgrade to 9.04.

So on my particular rig, Ubuntu 9.04 is looking pretty darn stable next to 8.04, which was no slouch in the stability department (after solving problems along the way with Pidgin and Flash).

What does this mean? As usual, I'll try to wait a while before upgrading to 9.10 because I'm enjoying use of such a good, working system, and I'd rather avoid the rush (and the overworked mirrors). And we're only six months away from the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04 ...

I always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

I just had one of those ominous Ubuntu crashes in which I can't ctrl-alt-backspace out of X or ctrl-alt-delete out of the OS entirely. I have to hard reset with the power switch.

I'm in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and this only happens when I'm running my Cnet CWD-854 USB Wifi stick. I do have a backup Wifi card, the trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (which runs on EVERYTHING), and just for the record the CWD-854 never died in OpenBSD.

But I'm not running OpenBSD ...

I was also running the newish Opera 10 Web browser, which thus far I think is "just OK" in Linux but "totally, completely game-changing" in Windows, where it blows both Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 way, way out of the water.

So just to see what's what (and it did take a couple of hours before the laptop died), I back using Firefox 3.0.14 in Ubuntu ... with the CWD-854. We'll see how that goes. Time to pull a print column deep out of you-know-where ...