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.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com