Ubuntu Networking :: Intermittent Wireless With Atheros AR5001X+ On Lucid?

I have an old Tatung tablet pc, with touchscreen, stupid speakers and an atheros wifi card (AR5001X+). With XP, everything works reasonably well, and wifi connectivity is rock solid. I know I'm asking for trouble installing *nix on this machine, but if the wireless worked, I'd be happy. However... With an updated Lucid install, I can see and connect to open, WEP, and WPA(1/2/tkip/aes/whatever) networks. I get good speeds with every network I've tried, but after a minute or two, my connection speed drops to zero, only to recover after another few minutes. A few minutes later, the wireless dies again, then reconnects....

Both the router and the tablet show that I still have a connection, and the connection speed recorded by both does not change from the 'working' condition. I get nothing in the logs (router or tablet) and no indication (aside from transfers stalling) that there's any problem. The 'network history' part of Gnome system monitor shows the data rate dropping to zero, but a network monitor applet on the gnome panel shows transmissions and (later) recieves. Reported signal strength remains constant, and seems to have no bearing on the frequency or length of the dropouts.

I've tried the stock lucid drivers, the lucid wireless backports, and madwifi (currently on madwifi) with no change to symptoms. I did think that it may be to do with scanning for networks (iwevent showed completed scans as the dropouts ended) so I removed network manager and tried static configuration with /etc/network/interfaces . The problems persited (although iwevent is now silent) and I am now using Wicd with no change.

lscpi:

Code:

sudo lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)
00:00.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation 82852/82855 GM/GME/PM/GMV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 02)

[code]....

I see nothing toobad in these, so I ran a longer test - I bash'd a while loop to ping the router, run ifconfig and iwconfig, and spit the results into files. I concurrently ran a wireshark capture. All of these contain a lot of text/data, so I've attached them here. I can't see any connection between the output of ifconfig/iwconfig/wireshark while the ping drops, but I'm no expert.

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