On 11/15/2010 11:29 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
Can't help directly with the hardware questions, but (a) if you are still within your Applecare coverage, take the thing in and get anything that doesn't work fixed before touching the OS, and (b) you might try Virtualbox with Centos as a guest (or VMware if you don't mind paying for it). I've generally found the vendor- supplied native video, sleep, and wireless tools work best on laptops and virtual machines work well enough for the client-type things I do under Centos.
Well, I have done the Apple support thing and Apple's official position is that I have an interference problem. The fact that I have six other laptops plus two X-Boxes, all with wireless connections, in the same household and none of which exhibit the problems that I have with the Macbook, is quite beside the point insofar as the Apple Genii are concerned.
This to me is utter BS, since I can see in the log files that that the wireless driver is arbitrarily disconnecting the link due to "lack of activity" and then choking when trying to reconnect. There are a host of other odd little symptoms that also lead me to believe that it is the Apple drivers that are at the root of the problem.
That actually seems pretty unlikely, since a bazillion other people use the same drivers... Or at least it is a quirk of your setup that triggers the issue. Do you have wireless phones in the same frequency range nearby? I do, and see disconnects that I think are related in my d-link router logs but haven't seen any problems with connections being re-established from anything including my son's macbook. Have you used wireless in any other locations, and if so, do you always see the same problem?
For one thing, a frequent occurrence is that I get a 'browser is offline' (in both Safari and Firefox) when opening a new tab, but the existing tabs in the same browser instance can visit new pages on existing connections!!?? How that works is beyond me but it happens, often.
That doesn't make much sense but you are probably trying to reuse a socket that has received a reset - browsers open several sockets simultaneously and the others might not have been busy during the network disconnect.
And it is the wireless NIC that I most need fixed. Right now I have to shut down the Airport and restart it to clear the problems. In itself this is no big deal, but I am just so tried of having to do this with such an expensive piece of kit.
Do you mean disable the wireless NIC and re-enable (which sort-of makes sense) or doing something to the router? If you really have to restart the router, that's probably the source of the problem.
If CentOS does not support the wireless in the Macbook then I am stuck with the sucker until I get up enough gumption to buy a Toshiba. Which is what I should have done when I allowed myself to be talked into the HP to begin with.
Hardware is all pretty much the same - it either works or it doesn't.