Display Occasionally Hangs with WIFI

[Mark Phillips]

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
mark at phillipsmarketing.biz
602 524-0376
480 945-9197 fax