Display Occasionally Hangs with WIFI

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Author: Mark Phillips
Date:  
To: PLUG
Subject: Display Occasionally Hangs with WIFI
I have ndiswrapper 1.16 installed on an old Pentium laptop running Debian
sarge (2.6.8-2-386). The wireless card is a DLink DWL-G630 using the mrv8ka51
driver. My access point is a Linksys WRT54G.

The pentium box is setup as a remote X-terminal over ssh - i.e. a minimal
installation of Debian and X. It makes a great remote terminal for my kids
for homework. (see Sterminal - a nifty script -
http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirling/computergeek/xterminal.html)

Most of the time this setup works just fine. However, occasionally, the
display hangs and doesn't come back for a couple of minutes, or never. The
computer is not dead - I can usually ssh from another computer. However, the
X-terminal session is frozen.

I have also noticed that if I run a ping from this computer over my local
network, I get on average a 1 ms response. But occasionally, the time jumps
to 30 or 50 ms.

How can I go about finding the cause of this in-frequent hanging? I don't know
if it is a ndiswrapper issue, card issue, slow Pentium issue, driver issue,
access point issue, phase of the moon, etc.

I thought about upgrading to the latest ndiswrapper, but it has to be compiled
with gcc >3.4 and my kernel was compiled with gcc3.3. I tried recompiling my
kernel with gcc3.4, but it failed to boot up. Probably a configuration issue,
even though I used the config file that came with my Debian kernel
2.6.8-2-386. Instead of fixing this problem only to find that the screen
hanging is not an ndiswrapper problem, I thought I would go back to the
actual problem I want to solve and see if there is another way to
troubleshoot it.

Thanks!
--
Mark Phillips
Phillips Marketing, Inc

602 524-0376
480 945-9197 fax
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