[Gnewsense-dev] Yeeloong wireless issue dissected

[Frederique W. Piccart]

Link on pastebin: http://gnewsense.pastebin.com/f4bbf7cf1

When you install gNewSense on your Yeeloong, you could randomly end up in
two situations, where situation one (the one you don't want to end up in)
seems to occur more than situation two.

1. Short and simple, your wireless is not useful. You need to sit right
next to the wireless accept point, or be in the same room, with having the
antennas exactly pointed towards you. You can identify being in this
situation seeing your wireless is always enabled, regardless of the Fn + F5
preference, you can't even disable it. Not only that, if you boot your
computer, in the kernel output you will see a mentioning of an experimental
wireless driver that could damage your hardware.

2. This one you want to be in. You can get great speeds over a reasonable
distance, with many obstacles in between (walls, ceilings, etc...) up to
300 - 400 KB/s regularly. You can identify being in this situation by the
fact you always have to press Fn + F5 to enable wireless. Also, after you
install the base system, and boot into text mode to install the desktop
through 'sudo tasksel install desktop', you will see the kernel output
something in the lines of 'RADIO OFF' or "polling off', this is a good
indication you are in the most preferred situation.

I've figured this out after a lot of testing. More specifically, trying to
make the wireless work decently in situation 1. Hours of testing, but I
could never get a decent connection while being in the first situation. The
solution? Keep reinstalling the base system until you end up in situation
2, and hopefully metad maintainers will fix this swiftly. samgee also
tested and confirmed this, and finally got decent wireless out of his
Yeeloong.

- Fred