Ok, I’ve been struggling lately with my wireless connectivity on my xubuntu laptop.  I’ve had periods where there have been loss connections or loss of DNS.  I finally found a couple of things that worked.  First downgrade the ndiswrapper.  The newer one that came with Gutsy seemed to be a bit buggy and from various forums most everyone was suggesting downgrading the ndiswrapper.  I thought about using fwcutter but I’ve heard that it’s more buggy than ndis.  So after downgrading the ndis driver I noticed my connectivity improved but would still have periodic problems with both issues.

I then happen upon another Ubuntu forum where someone suggested setting the rate on the interface through this command:

sudo iwconfig eth1 rate 24M

You can use iwlist scan to see what rates your wireless device supports.  Now I tried 54, and 36 hoping for better speed but was still having issues.  Trubblemaker suggested either 22 or 11 which provided better stability.  So I set mine to 24M and low and behold I finally have stable connectivity.

Talk about a pain in the arse, at least Windows doesn’t have this problem but why would I want to run Windows on my laptop?