Hi,

So I have this nice little iBook G4 that I've left unused for years and now I am trying to get it back to life.
I have changed the HDD for an SSD, installed MOS 3.17 and every thing looked nice but now I am experiencing bad problems with wifi.
MOS detects the available networks, I can connect to an SSID but ping is very erratic (from 20ms to 200ms for 8.8.8.8) and wayfarer barely manages to load a bit of morphos-team.net before it completely stalls. Then even ping won't work, saying "no buffer space available".
Any ideas?
TIA

Sergio

Broken/disconnected antenna?

Those old "Airports" were never really that good and with age you could have broken the antenna cable in the hinge, or disconnected it while adding that SSD.

I checked and the antennae look correctly connected. Is there a way to determine wich of antenna or card is faulty?

Forget internal WIFI-ports (Airport) on every IBook/PB for moment. It does'nt work properly. With Airport (PB and G5) I had endless problems. It works well under OSX, but under MOS most time it does'nt even connect, and if, it was never a stable connection (even 1m away from router). Useing Netgear-PC Card (PB) instead and anything is OK.

MOS team knows about, but since yet, there is no workaround (afaik).


[ Editiert durch Amigaharry2 26.04.2023 - 16:58 ]

Yes the airport system failure, but a solution is to use a wifi router conect to RJ45, I use a tp-link bought in MorphOS store when the shop was open. This wifi router is little and connect fine to my movil phone to get the internet connection.

Quote:

While there is certainly room for improvement, wifi (through Airport) works well enough to be usuable with my 1.67ghz powerbook. I do connect to a dedicated router attached to my modem because this seems to improve performance.

A lot depends on your network setup. You'll get best results connecting to an access point from the ~2005. Modern APs with features like band steering / mesh will cause most issues.

What is the difference in driver for Airport and Atheros cards? Atheros cards works perfect, while Airport in same WLAN is realy unstable and has a rather poor range...?
I tested with different routers (also old ones) and settings, but had no luck with Airport (neither PB nor G5) at all.
Btw: Under Mac-OSX, Airport works flawless and as expected.

@ Amigaharry2 - I seem to remember that the Apple Airport Extreme card model A1026 is not (or at least poorly) supported in MorphOS, whereas the A1027 works as well as you might expect, so it may be worth checking which card you have fitted in your systems.

If it's the all-in-one Airport/Bluetooth card (can't remember the model no. just now) that Apple supplied with later Mac Minis and other hardware then they too seem to work OK with MorphOS as well, should maybe add that they have been OK for me, and hopefully for other users.

Interessting.
I also own a Mini with silent-upgrade, which also does'nt work properly. In G5 it is a normal A1027.

WLAN is WEP-104 (also tested with WPA/WPA2), Band 2,4 GHz, Bandwith: 20MHz, Wireless 802.11 Modi: b,g,n, Channel 1. No other foreign WLANs here.

If Mac is very near to Router (1-2m) then a partly stable connection sometimes is possible. But it is impossible to use Envoy - other computers can be seen and connected, but data-transfer is impossible or terrible slow or has a lot of interrupts.
Needless to say, that LAN and Atheros-WLAN works flawless with same settings.
This behaviour occoured from beginning (since first Mini was supported by MOS) and nearly all of my friends have same problems.

> This behaviour occoured from beginning (since first Mini was supported by MOS)

It took almost 5 years from initial Mac mini support to support for its Wi-Fi.

> and nearly all of my friends have same problems.

My silent upgrade Mac mini's Wi-Fi worked like a charm with my cheap TP-Link router and about 3 meters between them.

@ Amigaharry2 - I also seem to remember that some users have had better reception with certain WiFi TX/RX (transmit/receive) channels like 6 and 11 compared to others, so it might be worth checking that too!