[RESOLVED] NDISWRAPPER causing lock-ups in KDE?

[CaptainSarcastic]

I partly just want to run this by some other people before launching into another round of troubleshooting.

I've been running KDE on this machine for over a year, and had zero problems.  I recently moved and am having to use wireless Internet on it, and only started having any problems after that.

The machine itself is a Gigabyte mobo with a Phenom II 965 x4 processor and 8GB of DDR3 RAM.

Because of the amount of RAM I have been running the most recent PAE kernel, non-BFS.  (For whatever reason this machine seems faster without BFS than with it.)

The wireless adapter I am using is a Linksys WUSB54g version 4.

When PCLOS loads it sees the device and loads a driver, but it has crazy packet loss and is not actually usable.  To get around this I loaded the Windows driver using NDISWRAPPER and it actually connects well.

The problem I have been having is that the machine will just lock completely at random intervals, with mouse frozen and nothing responding.  The only way I have been able to get out of it is to hard reboot, and due to this I did run fsck from a live CD today to see if any issues had resulted.  It did find and fix errors, so I was hoping the problem was temporary.

It wasn't.

I booted up again, had to configure my network to use the Windows driver, and the machine locked solid an hour or two later, requiring another hard shutdown.

The same adapter is working fine while booted into Windows on the same machine, although not with the driver that Windows Update had me update to, oddly enough.

My questions are:

1.  Is it possible that running NDISWRAPPER and a Windows driver with the PAE kernel is causing this?

2.  Rather than using the Windows driver is there something else I could be doing?

At this point I am going to need to fsck the drive again, and I am getting concerned enough I will probably run a diagnostic on the hard drive itself.  The hard drive was certainly healthy and had been running with no problems prior to the move, although that was always on a wired connection.

Aside from checking the hard drive I am considering hassling with setting up a router as an access point so I don't have to deal with a wireless adapter at all.  Before mucking about with that I thought I would ask to see if anyone had any additional insights.

Thanks!

[muungwana]

Do LED lights on your keyboard go on when the locking happen?.

The problem you are having is probably due to kernel panicking.You would be getting windows blue screen of death of you were using windows.

plug in the usb adapter and then open the terminal and run "lsusb" and post your result

[CaptainSarcastic]

For what it's worth, here is the lsusb output:

[captainsarcastic@localhost ~]$ lsusb

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 13b1:000d Linksys WUSB54G v4 802.11g Adapter [Ralink RT2500USB]
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 413c:2003 Dell Computer Corp. Keyboard
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 047d:1012 Kensington PocketMouse
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 058f:9360 Alcor Micro Corp. 8-in-1 Media Card Reader
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub


The reason that I was running the Windows driver in the first place was because the driver the system was using by default was barely functional.  It would usually connect to the router, but the connection had simply amazing packet loss (hovering around 80%).  Using the Windows driver I would get zero percent packet loss, but started getting the hard lock-ups.

[djohnston]

Captain,

I have the exact same USB card. Although I've had it for three or four years, it was put away in a drawer until six or eight months ago. When I first got the card, there was no acceptable Linux driver for it. I tried using it with ndiswrapper, but the performance and reliability was terrible.

When I did take it back out of the drawer, it was to use it with an older computer I have in a room a good 50 feet away from the router. The signal strength, depending on which meter I look at, is about 85%. Signal strength does not necessarily equal packet loss. The device now works with every PCLinuxOS live CD I've tried it with. Support for the device is now in the kernel, so I've had to do nothing lately to enable it.

As you can see by the listing below, it's the same card as yours. You can also see from the ifstat output, there has been zero packet loss. I'm currently running the 3.2.15-pclos1 kernel on that machine. I don't know about running KDE on it, as the machine's an 800MhZ PIII with 512MB of RAM. I'm using Openbox. R/X rates are not blazingly fast, but they are well within tolerable limits. The bottom of the lising shows the results of a recent packages update.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[darrel@PentiumIII ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 13b1:000d Linksys WUSB54G v4 802.11g Adapter [Ralink RT2500USB]
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 413c:3200 Dell Computer Corp. Mouse
Bus 002 Device 014: ID 049f:000e Compaq Computer Corp. Internet Keyboard
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1b1c:1ab1 
[darrel@PentiumIII ~]$ /sbin/ifstat
#kernel
Interface        RX Pkts/Rate    TX Pkts/Rate    RX Data/Rate    TX Data/Rate 
                 RX Errs/Drop    TX Errs/Drop    RX Over/Rate    TX Coll/Rate 
lo                    96 0            96 0          9954 0          9954 0     
                       0 0             0 0             0 0             0 0     
wlan0              43678 0         38598 0        34444K 0         5426K 0     
                       0 0             0 0             0 0             0 0     
[darrel@PentiumIII ~]$ uname -r
3.2.15-pclos1
[darrel@PentiumIII ~]$

Fetched 26.7MB in 1m9s (382kB/s)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are many different reasons why you could be getting poor signal strength and/or packet loss. If anyone can thoroughly troubleshoot your networking problems, it is muungwana.

[T6]

sounds like the device is not working properly

not sure how to diagnose that, my last adapter that failed, failed so hard that it was very easy to diagnose and discard

[CaptainSarcastic]

The adapter works fine in Windows 7 using a 64-bit driver that I found for it a couple years ago.  No problems at all.

The adapter also performs just fine when I have it use the appropriate 32-bit driver in PCLOS using ndiswrapper.  Packet loss goes away and no wifi issues, just the recurring lock-ups.

I am running the PAE kernel so that all 8 gigs of memory are seen - I'm not sure if that could a factor in the problem or not.

[T6]

the that discards the possible device failing

what driver are you using?

from where do you got the driver, from ralink website or from linksys?

i had a old sis adapter, the driver from sis didn't worked but the driver from the chipset manufacturer worked perfectly for years, could be good to try another driver here too

[CaptainSarcastic]

I'm using the 32-bit driver from Linksys with ndiswrapper.

I just wasted some time looking into setting up a router as a wireless bridge, and it turns out my router won't do that and won't take dd-wrt, either.

I think my next run at it will be to start up without the wireless adapter attached, then go through Synaptic and see what packages are installed that could be in play with the rt2500usb driver showing up, and any that might appear to be missing.

I just ran a short SMART test on the drive and it came back clean, but I might run the extended test just to be on the safe side.

[T6]

while you are doing that, also a good clean of the case, verify ram and a memtest could help too

i would check for different drivers on ralink site

[CaptainSarcastic]

I'm marking this as resolved rather than solved, as I never did sort out the issue with the old Linksys USB adapter.  I have, however, gotten around this issue by picking up a cheap Intellinet wireless N dongle, and now the system is running fine with the native RTL8192S driver.  The adapter seems to work considerably better with this in Linux than the OEM driver installed on the Windows side.