no wifi,looping sound,no audio,slow audio playback on ubuntu?

I’ve been working with the servers most of the time, and few days ago, i had free time to test ubuntu on one of my laptop, it’s not new but not too old either, it’s dual core MSI VR320 and guess what it’s kinda frustrating to have issues on this laptop upon installing ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04.

with 8.04, wifi (using WPA-PSK at home) is not working and sound is looping
with 9.04, wifi is ok but audio playback is damn too slow.

8.04 or known as hardy heron, I have no wifi. I tried to use ndiswrapper to use my windows drivers but no avail. I have an Ralink RT61 chipset and tried installing it’s linux drivers but failed. Here’s what I did:
a. download driver from ralinktech.com
b. uncompress the tarball file “2005_1230_RT61_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.0.tar.gz”  and follow the readme for installing

$ sudo cp Makefile.6 Makefile
$ sudo make all
$ sudo mkdir /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/
$ sudo cp *.bin /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/.
$ sudo cp rt61sta.dat /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/.

c. edit /etc/Wireless/RT61STA/rt61sta.dat

$ cd /etc/Wireless/RT61STA
$ sudo vi -b rt61sta.dat

d. copy the rt61.ko driver file to the modules folder, after that load it

$ sudo cp rt61.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/.
$ sudo depmod
$ sudo modprobe rt61

e. check if driver loaded

$iwconfig

I can connect thru unsecured wifi, but for WPA it cannot. Tried wpa_supplicant but again failed

RESULT: FAILED

Looping sound issue- did not bother to troubleshoot it

For 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope, i can connect to my WPA without problems but audio playback is very slow, my mp3s are messed. It’s never a performance issue.

I thought it’s my Realtek HD audio driver, so it’s time to test to upgrade my alsa driver. I downloaded the latest version which is 1.0.21 and compile it

Here’s what I did:

sudo rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ubuntu/media/snd-hda-intel/snd-hda-intel.ko
sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
sudo cd /usr/src
sudo mkdir alsa
sudo cd alsa
sudo wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.21.tar.bz2
sudo tar -xf alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
sudo cd alsa-driver-1.0.15.tar.bz2
sudo ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel
sudo make
sudo make install

RESULT: FAILED

SOLUTION: More GOOGLE

There I got the idea to use i386 kernel instead of the default generic linux. I thought an apt-get update and upgrade will do the trick, but later thought just a waste of bandwidth

I fire the command:

$sudo apt-get install linux-headers-386 linux-image-386 linux-386

Reboot and then select that on grub to boot

Then alas, all problems were gone

RESULT: SUCCESS

Well, I guess it’s not really an ubuntu issue, it’s more on the hardware part.

Anyway, stressing but good experience in the end

Conclusion: Google is still my best friend.

BTW, I just tried Opensuse this morning, and wifi WPA and sound card issue as well. my laptop really for i386 kernel only.

http://www.ralinktech.com/drivers/Linux/2005_1230_RT61_Linux_STA_Drv1.0.3.0.tar.gz
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