Intel 3945 en route

Well, after tiring of trying to get the standard Broadcom 4312bcm wireless card to work again in the Mini, I’ve gone ahead and ordered an Intel 3945ABG mini pci wireless card from Amazon. I believe it’s the same as in my Inspiron 1420, and should work flawlessly.

Shipping was free, but it could more than a week to arrive. We’ll see if $30 will fix my Mini’s woes.

Broadcom 4312 dying? AKA No buffer space available

My Mini 9 appears to have suffered a grievous internal wound; perhaps requiring surgery. A few weeks ago, the wireless started acting up. It seems to connect to my router fine, and signal strength is solid.

However, after about 5-10 minutes, sometimes quicker, all traffic dies. Network Manager reports that i”m still connected, with great signal strength, but all ping attempts to my router result in:
ping: sendmsg: No buffer space available

At first, I suspected it was overheating, as the mini has no fan or other moving parts, so I left it on a cold stone floor. No real change. I did some searching, and found that in previous releases this was discovered and fixed with a kernel update in backports. However, I’m running the Jaunty 9.04 UNR release, and the Broadcom wireless has been working fine since I’ve had the machine in December. This has me truly stumped, and  I”ve submitted my own bug report on Launchpad. Hopefully someone smarter than I will come to my rescue.

If not, then I may just have to buy an intel 3945 Mini PCI wireless card to replace it. It appears they are not too expensive, and my Inspiron 1420 runs flawlessly.

Until then, my Mini is stranded 😦

Jaunty Netbook Remix: Improved battery life?

OK,

It’s been approxmately a week since  I’ve installed the 9.04 UNR on the Mini 9. I did a completely clean install, backing up my longtime /home partition and formatting both / and /home as Ext4, just so I can see what all the fuss is about.

I got the 9.04 .img file and installed the Ubuntu Image Writer, put it on my trusty 4gig USB flashdrive and booted up.

The install went smoothly, as usual. A little snazzier menus, but generally the same, except for picking Ext4.

After install,  I re-applied  my /home files, disabled Maximus (I hate the auto-maximizing of everything) made a few tweaks and rebooted.
At first, it seemed like I was getting much poorer battery life than under 8.10, to the tune of at least an hour. Previously, I was getting about 3:15. Now with this new release, it was reporting exactly 2:00 exactly for battery life.

Not good. At all.

However, after reading up a bit, I let the netbook drain completely, to the point the system does it’s own graceful shutdown as the battery shuts down. That’s a neat feature, by the way. With only a minute or to, and a warning as well, Ubuntu will do a full shutdown process, so you’re not stuck with an abruptly-dead machine and potentially corrupt files. After it was dead, I plugged it back in and let it charge overnight.

This morning I powered it back on and set it to running a few typical tasks, to prevent th machine from going to sleep and let it drain again from a full charge. While the power manager is not accurate for duration ( it initially reported 2:30 this time around) just before  going dead again i ran ‘uptime’ and was informed the system has been powered on for nearly 3:30 on its own battery.
Very impressive for my needs, and on a 4 cell battery.

In other news, 9.04 boots *very* fast. Haven’t timed it, but much quicker than 8.10.