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Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 11th, '12, 04:31
by mark9117
I'm dealing with a Lenovo laptop that had a wifi card fail. I connected a wifi dongle to it and it connects to the network with signal strength around 85% as portrayed here by iwconfig:

Code: Select all
wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:xxxxxxx  Nickname:"xxxxxxxxx"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.457 GHz  Access Point: xxxxxxxxxxx   
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm   
          RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B   
          Encryption key: <redacted>   Security .mode:restricted
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:87/100  Signal level:-40 dBm  Noise level:-96 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0


Net applet only shows 5%.

Is there a way to fix this? Is there a more desirable replacement for net applett in KDE?

Would love to hear about it.


Mark

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 11th, '12, 10:39
by tom_
I'm using Networkmanager,
the signal strenght seem fine but you need a widget to use it,
it doesn't have an icon in the System Tray

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 11th, '12, 13:19
by doktor5000
This is actually hard to fix, as many drivers report bad values. What does
Code: Select all
cat /proc/net/wireless
say?

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 12th, '12, 05:22
by mark9117
Code: Select all
# cat /proc/net/wireless
Inter-| sta-|   Quality        |   Discarded packets               | Missed | WE
face | tus | link level noise |  nwid  crypt   frag  retry   misc | beacon | 22
  eth0: 0000    5.  -256.  -256.       0      0      0      0      0        0
 wlan0: 0000   78   210   160        0      0      0      0      0        0


More or less, that's it.


Mark

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 12th, '12, 14:15
by doktor5000
Could it be that net_applet reports the 5% of eth0 whereas in reality you're using wlan0?

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 13th, '12, 09:31
by mark9117
doktor5000 wrote:Could it be that net_applet reports the 5% of eth0 whereas in reality you're using wlan0?


Looks like a possibility, but I can't get eth0 to connect at all. It seems to be bad hardware.

I don't know.


Mark

Re: Net-applet showing incorrect signal

PostPosted: Aug 15th, '12, 20:12
by doktor5000
Well, to keep it a bit pragmatic, if the connection is stable, why bother? You could report it as a bug, nevertheless: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly
Otherwise you'd need to look into the code of net_applet to see the reason for this ...